October Surprise 2016 - octobersurprise2016.org

Episode 147 has been uploaded.

Preview:

YouTube, later.

A-Block

• SPECIAL COMMENT: Those were Trump’s marbles he just lost.
• At 2:49 PM, Eastern Dementia Time: “I’m not running to terminate the ACA, as crooked Joe BUDEN … DIS-INFORMATES and MIS-INFORMATES all the time, I’m running to CLOSE THE BORDER …” There is no such word as “Disinformate.” There is also no such word as “MIS-informate.”
• Also, unless I’ve been getting it wrong since 1973, “BUDEN” is not how the president spells his name. Trump’s cheese has slid off his cracker.

****, his cracker has slipped off his cracker.

• It is impossible to say that he cannot possibly last like this,  what with the forces of aphasia and dementia and narcissism and head injury and whatever else there is, pulling him apart … but of course he’s lasted in approximately this same space for months now — and in spaces not really that much BETTER than this one for years and decades and if the early anecdotes are correct, a lifetime. Still: inventing your own words is a sign of a dozen different PHYSICAL problems, to say nothing of psychological ones like bipolarity and environmental ones like huffing D-Con Roach Room Fogger.
• HELP ME RONNA, HELP HELP ME RONNA: And now she belongs to the ages. Five days, one show. Not the shortest tenure in television history nor the fastest-cancelled program (still held by an ABC comedy show from 1969, cancelled just before the first commercial). But NBC’s decision to ax Ronna McDaniel — no matter how tortured, self-serving, and late the protests from its stars might have been, does offer some small hope.
• The point of all this — and perhaps the value of this internal rebellion — is that perhaps the somnambulant American political media, especially the American TELEVISION political media — has awakened from its naïve stupor. I have been saying here for eighteen months that EVERY news organization in this country has had the same meeting: what do we do if Trump regains power. Not “what do we do journalistically” but what do we do to protect our profits — and what do we do so when Trump starts jailing reporters and TV executives, he’ll leave us alone. Or, more realistically, he’ll let us become one of his propaganda channels.
• Remember, in the minds of its executives, television news isn’t a kind of NEWS, it’s a kind of TELEVISION. It is designed to fill the places between the commercials. If it serves some kind of public purpose, hey, great, as long as that doesn’t mean we have to go TOO many hours cancelling all those advertisements just because some POPE died or something.
• Putting Trump on and taking Mehdi Hasan off and hiring Ronna McDaniel was INOCULATION, nothing more, nothing less. It was proving to Trump and the MAGAs that while no, we aren’t shuttering MSNBC and we’re not in favor of this whole “end the peaceful transfer of power” and “fascism is the new democracy” stuff — hey, go on … we’re listening.
• American TV news isn’t going to save us from creeping fascism. But maybe — MAYBE = the scattered, largely selfish, righteous-ehhh-kinda righteous indignation at NBC means American TV news will stop HELPING fascism creep faster. Guard rail? No. Scattering spike strips across democracy’s highways? Uhh, ok, maybe we’ll stop.
• Also, I sing. I mean: “Help Me Ronna”? I was supposed to RESTRAIN myself from THAT?

Yes. For the love of all of the gods, yes, PLEASE no singing!!!

B-Block

• (30:57) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Congressman Tim Burchett sued by Denton Loudermill Jr., the Kansas City man he claimed was (a) a Super Bowl parade shooter and (b) an “illegal alien.” He was neither. Ari Fleischer actually slams Biden for supporting George W. Bush’s war in Iraq that Ari helped sell to a gullible America.

• And Maria Bartiromo (“wide open border”), Nancy “I Shoulda Stayed In Bed” Mace (“Biden”), Anthony Sabatini (“DEI”), Matt Schlapp (“I’m not an expert” — yes, we knew that already Matt — “but it was drug-addled employees and lockdowns during COVID”), Glenn Thrush (“the federal government”), Marjorie Taylor Greene (“terrorist attack”),  Phil Lyman (GOP candidate for the governor of Utah, who has the perfect name for a Republican) (“diversity”), Alex Jones (“WW3”), Andrew Tate (“cyber-attack!”) and a random stranger on the Internet named Rose Graham (“the Puff Daddy raid”) share the honors for spreading conspiracy theories about the Baltimore bridge accident.

(Sadly, I was able to add a few that weren’t on Keith’s list. And it was ANTHONY Sabatini, not David.)

David Simon asked a question that we’ve all been wondering.

C-Block

• THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I mentioned those tortured anti-Ronna comments from MSNBC. Lawrence O’Donnell was astonishingly wrong in his recap of how TV news in the old days didn’t reward, say, Nixon’s Watergate conspirators with gigs (other than Pat Buchanan, John Ehrlichmann, Robert Bork, Gordon Liddy, plus Ollie North from Iran-Contra and a series of ice cream commercials for Ehrlichmann).

• Since I’ve brought [Lawrence O’Donnell] up, I might as well tell you what a schmuck he is, like when he guest hosted Countdown and while I was out a few weeks, he tried to get me fired so he could take over the show and when that didn’t work, he just stole a couple of the producers and got his own show. Oh, by the way, I WAS away for a couple weeks because my Dad was dying.

Episode 147 has been uploaded.

Preview:

YouTube, later.

A-Block

• SPECIAL COMMENT: Those were Trump’s marbles he just lost.
• At 2:49 PM, Eastern Dementia Time: “I’m not running to terminate the ACA, as crooked Joe BUDEN … DIS-INFORMATES and MIS-INFORMATES all the time, I’m running to CLOSE THE BORDER …” There is no such word as “Disinformate.” There is also no such word as “MIS-informate.”
• Also, unless I’ve been getting it wrong since 1973, “BUDEN” is not how the president spells his name. Trump’s cheese has slid off his cracker.

****, his cracker has slipped off his cracker.

• It is impossible to say that he cannot possibly last like this,  what with the forces of aphasia and dementia and narcissism and head injury and whatever else there is, pulling him apart … but of course he’s lasted in approximately this same space for months now — and in spaces not really that much BETTER than this one for years and decades and if the early anecdotes are correct, a lifetime. Still: inventing your own words is a sign of a dozen different PHYSICAL problems, to say nothing of psychological ones like bipolarity and environmental ones like huffing D-Con Roach Room Fogger.
• HELP ME RONNA, HELP HELP ME RONNA: And now she belongs to the ages. Five days, one show. Not the shortest tenure in television history nor the fastest-cancelled program (still held by an ABC comedy show from 1969, cancelled just before the first commercial). But NBC’s decision to ax Ronna McDaniel — no matter how tortured, self-serving, and late the protests from its stars might have been, does offer some small hope.
• The point of all this — and perhaps the value of this internal rebellion — is that perhaps the somnambulant American political media, especially the American TELEVISION political media — has awakened from its naïve stupor. I have been saying here for eighteen months that EVERY news organization in this country has had the same meeting: what do we do if Trump regains power. Not “what do we do journalistically” but what do we do to protect our profits — and what do we do so when Trump starts jailing reporters and TV executives, he’ll leave us alone. Or, more realistically, he’ll let us become one of his propaganda channels.
• Remember, in the minds of its executives, television news isn’t a kind of NEWS, it’s a kind of TELEVISION. It is designed to fill the places between the commercials. If it serves some kind of public purpose, hey, great, as long as that doesn’t mean we have to go TOO many hours cancelling all those advertisements just because some POPE died or something.
• Putting Trump on and taking Mehdi Hasan off and hiring Ronna McDaniel was INOCULATION, nothing more, nothing less. It was proving to Trump and the MAGAs that while no, we aren’t shuttering MSNBC and we’re not in favor of this whole “end the peaceful transfer of power” and “fascism is the new democracy” stuff — hey, go on … we’re listening.
• American TV news isn’t going to save us from creeping fascism. But maybe — MAYBE = the scattered, largely selfish, righteous-ehhh-kinda righteous indignation at NBC means American TV news will stop HELPING fascism creep faster. Guard rail? No. Scattering spike strips across democracy’s highways? Uhh, ok, maybe we’ll stop.
• Also, I sing. I mean: “Help Me Ronna”? I was supposed to RESTRAIN myself from THAT?

Yes. For the love of all of the gods, yes, PLEASE no singing!!!

B-Block

• (30:57) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: Congressman Tim Burchett sued by Denton Loudermill Jr., the Kansas City man he claimed was (a) a Super Bowl parade shooter and (b) an “illegal alien.” He was neither. Ari Fleischer actually slams Biden for supporting George W. Bush’s war in Iraq that Ari helped sell to a gullible America.

• And Maria Bartiromo (“wide open border”), Nancy “I Shoulda Stayed In Bed” Mace (“Biden”), Anthony Sabatini (“DEI”), Matt Schlapp (“I’m not an expert” — yes, we knew that already Matt — “but it was drug-addled employees and lockdowns during COVID”), Glenn Thrush (“the federal government”), Marjorie Taylor Greene (“terrorist attack”),  Phil Lyman (GOP candidate for the governor of Utah, who has the perfect name for a Republican) (“diversity”), Alex Jones (“WW3”), Andrew Tate (“cyber-attack!”) and a random stranger on the Internet named Rose Graham (“the Puff Daddy raid”) share the honors for spreading conspiracy theories about the Baltimore bridge accident.

(Sadly, I was able to add a few that weren’t on Keith’s list. And it was ANTHONY Sabatini, not David.)

David Simon asked a question that we’ve all been wondering.

C-Block

• THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: I mentioned those tortured anti-Ronna comments from MSNBC. Lawrence O’Donnell was astonishingly wrong in his recap of how TV news in the old days didn’t reward, say, Nixon’s Watergate conspirators with gigs (other than Pat Buchanan, John Ehrlichmann, Robert Bork, Gordon Liddy, plus Ollie North from Iran-Contra and a series of ice cream commercials for Ehrlichmann).

• Since I’ve brought [Lawrence O’Donnell] up, I might as well tell you what a schmuck he is, like when he guest hosted Countdown and while I was out a few weeks, he tried to get me fired so he could take over the show and when that didn’t work, he just stole a couple of the producers and got his own show. Oh, by the way, I WAS away for a couple weeks because my Dad was dying.

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Have you heard about ex-Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro’s aborted attempt to evade criminal charges by slipping into Hungary’s embassy, possibly en route to an unmolested air route to Budapest? According to a heavily documented story in Monday’s New York Times, the disgraced wannabe strongman, the subject of multiple criminal investigations, slipped into Hungary’s embassy in Brasilia on the night of February 12, four days after authorities confiscated his passport. Accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the government in 2022, Bolsonaro holed up in the embassy until the afternoon of February 14.

Bolsonaro’s lawyer said there was nothing nefarious about the three-night stay: He merely wanted to talk politics with like-minded ultra conservative Hungarian officials. “Any other interpretations are clearly fictional works. In practice, just another piece of fake news,” the advogado said in a statement.

Bolsonaro and his one time Hungarian counterpart in the practice of “illiberal democracy,” Viktor Orban, long had a theatrical romance. News that Bolsonaro would well want to pursue asylum possibilities in Hungary is as understandable as it is sensational. He faces a wide variety of accusations, ranging from a coup plot to a scheme to sell jewelry he received as state gifts, to falsifying his Covid vaccination record to gain entrance into the United States. Along the way, his hardball tactics and incendiary rhetoric against opponents earned him the sobriquet, “Trump of the Tropics.” In 2019, Trump returned the favor, saying he favored NATO membership for Brazil. Now Trump is the Bolsonaro of the North.

Viktor Orban apparently decided he’d had quite enough of Bolsonaro once he left office, however—especially with so much dumpster smoke hovering over his head. Good relations with Brazil are more important to Orban than granting asylum to the noisy has-been.

Likewise, Orban may be a Trump fan, but not to the extent that he’s going to risk rupturing relations with Washington by taking him in. But Trump may well be pondering his alternatives as he wakes up to the prospect of prison should the juries in four separate trials find him guilty on the most serious of the 91 counts facing him, including, like Bolsonaro, plotting to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021. One option is to run.

After all, it’s hard to imagine Trump submitting to handcuffs and a prison jumpsuit should any of those trials look to go sideways on him. Bolsonaro’s escapade should be taken not only as an object lesson on what Trump might be inspired to do, and what U.S. authorities should prepare for.

Surveillance cameras caught Bolosonaro entering the Hungarian Embassy in Brasilia. (via New York Times)

Who would take him? Vladimir Putin would seem to be his only option. Certainly neither China nor Saudi Arabia would see little advantage in welcoming, much less helping Trump escape his criminal and financial liabilities, at a cost of rupturing relations with Washington. Putin would wisely treat him like an oligarch, while cordoning him off from all but other disgraced exiles, like Ed Snowden.

North Korea? It’s possible a desperate Trump would find that attractive—but only if Kim promises Trump a slice of slice of desolate beachfront to build a gaudy new golf course. There, dining alone in the splendor of his gold-plated clubhouse, he can dream of what might have been, had he only caught a break.

After the attack on Crocus, it seemed like Russia’s entire security system had failed, leaving many puzzled. During my investigation, I’ve found interesting details, compiling them to shed light and address many questions

Likes and shares are welcome.https://t.co/zcBeb9P1X4

— Tatarigami_UA (@Tatarigami_UA) March 26, 2024

“We are witnessing a clear indication of the “Wagnerization” of the entire system—a system’s shift where barbaric behavior, akin to the actions of the Wagner Group, is not concealed but openly displayed to society. This mirrors the brazen conduct of Wagner, which openly executed…

— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) March 27, 2024

After the attack on Crocus, it seemed like Russia’s entire security system had failed, leaving many puzzled. During my investigation, I’ve found interesting details, compiling them to shed light and address many questions

Likes and shares are welcome.https://t.co/zcBeb9P1X4

— Tatarigami_UA (@Tatarigami_UA) March 26, 2024

“We are witnessing a clear indication of the “Wagnerization” of the entire system—a system’s shift where barbaric behavior, akin to the actions of the Wagner Group, is not concealed but openly displayed to society. This mirrors the brazen conduct of Wagner, which openly executed…

— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) March 27, 2024

After the attack on Crocus, it seemed like Russia’s entire security system had failed, leaving many puzzled. During my investigation, I’ve found interesting details, compiling them to shed light and address many questions

Likes and shares are welcome.https://t.co/zcBeb9P1X4

— Tatarigami_UA (@Tatarigami_UA) March 26, 2024

“We are witnessing a clear indication of the “Wagnerization” of the entire system—a system’s shift where barbaric behavior, akin to the actions of the Wagner Group, is not concealed but openly displayed to society. This mirrors the brazen conduct of Wagner, which openly executed…

— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) March 27, 2024

https://t.co/CR9O8iVUcl – CROCUS – POCUS: OSINT ANALYSIS #NewsAndTimes #NT #TNT #News #Times#World #USA #POTUS #DOJ #FBI #CIA #DIA #ODNI#Israel #Mossad #Netanyahu#Ukraine #NewAbwehr #OSINT#Putin #Russia #GRU #Путин, #Россия#SouthCaucasus #Bloggershttps://t.co/O0SIgLVWzM… pic.twitter.com/f7qeHFwIdE

— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) March 26, 2024