CSotD: Homework is 90% of your grade

 

I’m not necessarily standing behind anything today, but I’m promoting the idea of doing your damn homework, so I got a laugh out of Ann Telnaes’ reaction to a new federal policy cutting back on people working at home rather than at a desk in an office.

As she notes, Dear Leader is more chained to The Presidential Bedroom than to the Oval Office.

She doesn’t include a TV, I think for graphic reasons rather than because she’s unaware that he spends a significant amount of his “executive time” consulting with the disembodied voices on Fox and Friends.

 

This Sunday, Reliable Sources had an eight-minute segment with Matt Gertz from Media Matters, who tracks the times that Trump live-tweets a comment that can be traced to something that has aired on TV in roughly the same timeframe.

The segment is worth watching, and, yes, I know Media Matters is liberal but if you think the conservatives are going to keep track of this stuff, you don’t understand how politics work.

As noted in the graphic, Gertz tracked Trump’s tweets back to Fox 559 times and to Fox business 98 times and to everyone else in television a combined 24 times.

To which I would add only that, if the stories from Fire and Fury, A Warning, Fear and, now, A Very Stable Genius, are true — and they can’t all be false — it would be nice if he’d listen to his staff, his advisers and some senior people from the Pentagon as often as he takes advice from Fox & Friends and from his Secretary of Disinformation.

 

And as a for instance

Mike Lester makes the point, I think, that the people (and animals) impacted by the Australian bushfires know damn well that it’s the lack of action for climate relief that is to blame, despite the promotion by climate change deniers that arson was a significant cause of the fires.

The issue of arsonists was quickly cleared up by Australian authorities, with some of the problem being that anyone who was ticketed for running a forbidden burn barrel or tossing out a cigarette was listed as an “arsonist” along with the very few sparkies who actually lit a fire, and some of it being that the figures cited by climate change deniers were for the entire year, not just the bushfire season.

Here’s an extensive explanation from Politifact, but the bottom line is that, if you did any homework, you’d know this. The information has been available in more bite-sized pieces from the straight press in Australia and elsewhere, and by “straight press” I mean those other than the Murdoch rags which promote the arsonist myth.

My own skepticism about the cartoon being that the kangaroo is a guy in a costume, which may be Lester’s way of suggesting that he’s a fake, which brings us back to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his dictum that you are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts.

At least you didn’t used to be.

 

JD Crowe‘s updating of American Gothic made me laugh though I think Bernie is a whole lot more country than Liz. They make a lovely couple nonetheless.

However, their semi-fictional dustup brings another point to mind, which is that, if believing in Australian arsonists requires working hard to choose your facts, I would add that believing in Bernie Bros requires an equal amount of deliberate fact-sorting.

“But they’re all over the Internet!”

Indeed they are. That’s how trollbots work.

This is an election year and if you believe everything you see on Facebook and Twitter, you’ve got a ring in your nose and the chain leads back to a factory in St. Petersburg.

Smarten up and start doing some homework.

 

The issue of who said what to whom is somewhat less clear, but I like — despite that racist feather — Chip Bok‘s depiction of this Alice-in-Wonderland questioning in the last debate:

I’m not a Bernie supporter this time around, but I’m a truth supporter and that was an astonishing turn of phrase from a professional journalist and Bok is correct that it was a “when did you stop beating your wife” moment.

For those who are supporting Bernie, or are considering doing so or are looking to load up on ammo to use against him, he gave an extensive interview to New Hampshire Public Radio this past weekend that is worth either listening to or reading the transcript.

He was asked about the purported conversation at some length and responded, as he has, as his supporters have, that it would have been in stark contrast to his statements and actions of the past 30 years, but went further, and, since I’m going to give him more than a sound bite, I’ll add another cartoon and let him respond to that, too.

 

Signe Wilkinson suggests that times change, and Bernie concurs. Here’s how he answered those related matters:

(I just left that bit on the end to show why I like living in New Hampshire. At some
point we put the gossip aside and focus on things that matter.)

 

Bob Gorrell makes a valid point, and Bernie responded to a question about that, too, but I’ve given him enough air time and you’ll have to go read it for yourself.

The basic point is this: You can have an opinion without letting it fog your judgment, and liking or disliking Trump should be separate from a juror’s responsibility to evaluate evidence.

Too bad each party doesn’t get a dozen preemptory challenges.

 

 

Finally today, Ed Hall was not the only person to note that Trump celebrated Martin Luther King Day by celebrating himself, and, yes, that does make him a very small person indeed.

And it makes me wonder how he felt about King when he and his old man were being prosecuted for the kind of discrimination in housing that King fought against?

Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it. His pal Leadbelly wrote a less specific but better one: