Voters of Tomorrow? Full of shit, and even more, full of sellouts

I'm voting for the Communist, not Jill Stein, but I can still call out Blue Anon PR groups, who think they're cute, but are actually full of shit. And full of sellouts.

And, Voters of Tomorrow  founded by Santiago Mayer, is exactly that. Per their Wiki, they endorsed Genocide Joe in March, then Kamala is a ZionistCop as soon as she pushed him aside.

Now, per Stein's campaign email account, they're attacking her with a not-serious, and presumably full of shit, TikTok campaign.

Their website hoists them by their own petard:

Too many politicians have failed our generation by putting their futures over ours.

Really. As I said on Twitter, this would be:

Kamala is a Cop? Kamala is a Zionist Cop? Kamala is a Friend of Banksters?

There you go. Putting banksters and Zionists, and provoking Russia into unnecessary war, is putting your futures first how?

Also per their Wiki:

In 2022, Voters of Tomorrow published its "Gen Z Agenda," a legislative platform based on polling of college students nationwide. The platform contains policies including raising the minimum wage, abolishing the filibuster in Congress, protecting abortion rights, preventing gun violence, and combating climate change.[25][4] Voters of Tomorrow claims it lobbied The White House and over 100 Congressional offices on its "Gen Z Agenda" in 2022 and boasted its progress in certain areas.

Really? Dems could have done LOTS more to federalize Roe when Dear Leader was president, especially his first two years. They could have pushed for a minimum wage hike — AND put a COLA into the minimum wage — during Genocide Joe's first two years.

We haven't even mentioned the Democrats stealing the Green New Deal, watering it down, then not passing it. Democrats don't take climate change seriously. They'll lie about that, though.

We haven't even talked about AOC, a fraud already years ago.

That said, let's look at the board and advisors, per the about page.

The one non-kiddie pool board member? First is Randi Weingarten. Signer of that bullshit Harper's letter of 2020. Second is Olivia Troye, a Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ member who worked in Mike Pence's office when he was Veep. Seriously, she's a piece of fucking work. Third is Rania Batrice, a Palestinian-American sellout of her own people, as she's stanning for genocide.

Advisors? Michele Alexander (NOT the New Jim Crow author) is also a sellout of Palestinians, stanning for Harris despite her past with Physicians for Human Rights and DAWN/MENA plus Human Rights Watch. Joely Fisher? Hollywood Democrat eye candy. Sari Beth Rosenberg? History teacher who apparently doesn't teach students enough about the Nakba. Fred Wellman? Bankrupt friend of Lincoln Project guru Steve Schmidt.

Santiago Mayer may have been sincere in founding the organization, but he's willingly let himself be co-opted. Think of him as a BlueAnon Charlie Kirk if you want to be cynical. Shit, for all I know, this may be like Chuckles and that's not cynicism.

Anyway, all of you, along with Shepard Fairey? Fuck off. Per Drop Site News, this is the type of horror you support. Or this. And this is the contempt for international law you support.

Or this, since Biden admits helping kill Sinwar.

Shortly after the October 7 massacres, I directed Special Operations personnel and our intelligence professionals to work side-by-side with their Israeli counterparts to help locate and track Sinwar and other Hamas leaders hiding in Gaza.

And, Genocide Joe ignored the background of decades of Bibi and decades of Zionism leading to this point.

So did Kamala is a Zionist Cop in a statement almost identical to Genocide Joe's.

No wonder a lot Muslim voters don't like you, and actually support the Jill Stein that you hate:

Yes, Trump feels the same way. And? You have an option to be ethical. And have chosen wrongly.

Let me add that Mayer is himself a sellout. He started the group over Trump's "Muslim ban."

You're sellouts, those of you I listed above who have claimed to support human rights, or who have a Palestinian background.

'Pink slime' journalism and duopoly money-laundering

Excellent piece by Columbia Journalism Review, following up on a report it did about the Tow Center and other folks. The biggest takeaways from CJR:

1. This problem has grown a lot since the original Tow piece.

2. Per a link to Open Secrets, although this started as a conservative to wingnut-conservative project, liberals are doing it, too. One biggie is the group behind the Shadow vote-tabulation app of infamy from the Iowa Democratic caucus. Another is Pantsuit Nation, obvious Hillbot folks. So, we're talking neoliberals. A third group also gets George Soros PAC money. (Cue wingnut conspiracy theories.)

3. What CJR doesn't mention is that, primarily for capital reasons, leftists aren't. (That said, CJR's general failure to distinguish liberal and leftist is itself an issue.)

4. The original "pink slime" wasn't necessarily partisan as much as it was cheap hypercapitalism.

5. Wanna know who's doing this in Texas? Page 11 of this link. Metric Media and Local News Network are conservative as are Record. None of the links are liberal.

Missing from the CJR account is the problem with this much capitalism sloshing in the system. That's especially true with the Open Secrets piece mentioning IRS concerns. Related? The duopoly issues.

Per two tweets:

Good piece by @acookiecrumbles but cld have used more.
1. More bkgrnd on amnt dark money sloshing around natl elections
2. How much of this is "legal" money laundering of some sort?
2A. Related? Here in Tex-ass, per websites link, even tho we're "swing," all sites r rightist 1/x

— Hiroshima 75: Remember the FULL STORY 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) August 5, 2020

and

3. Framing this in terms of duopoly politics. Greens and further left don't have money for this, and I'm unaware of any of the right or quasi-right sites boosting capital-L Libertarians.
4. Re the Open Secrets link, more IRS-related follow-up?

— Hiroshima 75: Remember the FULL STORY 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) August 5, 2020

that's more detail on how I see that either this piece could have gone further or that it could use another follow-up.

Update: Facebook says it will tighten up on what from pink slime websites counts as news. That said, the new policy has multiple loopholes, and, as usual, I have "Facebook says" in one hand and "shit" in the other. Given that Facebook fired an engineer for documenting its preferential treatment to wingnut outfits that had posts flagged as "fake news," you'll pardon me for being skeptical.

A noun, a verb and Bernie for the #IronStache!

Now that Rob Quist and Jon Ossoff got their butts kicked in special elections, the David Brock wing of the Democratic Party is now touting Randy Bryce, the "Iron Stache," as a hero for the 2018 midterm regular election. A spate of national news stories came out about him shortly after he cut his first campaign video announcing his run in Wisconsin against Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Those stories didn't come out of nowhere. They came out of the D.C.-based Democratic PR former of Hilltop Public Solutions, a place so astroturfy it invented the word "grasstops." That's the "HPS" in the photo.

And yes, it is astroturfy, too.

Meanwhile, in our Peter-principled inside-the-Beltway media, a young Washington Post writer Wednesday was clueless that she was even being fed this shite by high-dollar PR flaks.

When American democracy dies, it will be from the last reporter swallowing the PR sausage in entrails of political flaks, to riff on Voltaire.

As for policies, Bryce has none that he's willing to stand on.

Asked by Sarah Jones of The New Republic to comment on single-payer national health care, the response of the man who went through testicular cancer and whose family is a walking billboard for it, said, "I favor getting there."

Yep, that was it.

This, of course, leeds to spoofing.

Higher minimum wage? "I favor getting there."

Peace in the Middle East? "I favor getting there."

Draining the swamp? "I favor getting there."

Campaign finance reform? "I favor getting there."

Trans Pacific Partnership? "I favor getting there."

Moving beyond the current Democratic establishment? "I favor getting there."

Sadly, short of Counterpunch, that will never be covered. Even at The Nation, John Nichols can't or won't tell you that Bryce is already being "packaged" by DC political consultants. Or that these consultants are ultimately the David Brock wing of the Democratic Party.

Down with Tyranny puffs him too, insinuating he's a Berniecrat, when he's not, per his Twitter at right, and that doesn't mean that much anyway, other than the Sanders Institute funneling money to him, maybe?

(Bryce has now pulled down the Twitter post. I'm leaving the photographically blank space as a sign of how much of a political "Player" he is. In the first 72 hours after his campaign, after people like me and others started looking through his Twitter feed, he started doing — or HPS started doing — a massive cleanup effort on his account.)

Update, March 28, 2018: At DWT, Howie continues to puff the Stache to the point of ignoring he has a primary opponent, Cathy Myers, who arguably is to his left. More about her here.

Beyond that, the Stache is "meh" on the Trans Pacific Partnership and otherwise closer to being a Hillbot than a Berniecrat. Don't believe me? Go to his website or run through his Twitter feed, especially before he tries to clean up more stuff.

DWT also says "But Obama won that district in 2008." Big deal. Obama won by 3 percentage points while Ryan dodged Dear Leader's short coattails and was re-elected by 19.

Also don't forget he is not the only Dem in the race. Yes, there's an actual primary. And one of Bryce's three previous electoral losses was in a primary.

This obviously a coronation by DC folks sniffing way too much George Lakoff.

And there's more. The Stache loves him some Russian nutbar conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch. Loves her so much that he even offered her some neocon "Freedom Fries" in one Tweet.

This guy is Joe the Plumber with the addition of a David Brock tramp stamp.

And an FEC fine for failure to disclose campaign contributions when treasurer for Rob Zerban's Congressional run, it seems.

Others are noting his establishmentarianism, along with some of his fence-straddling. This one is not bad, though it tries to paint him as a full Berniecrat, which he wasn't at all.

I do appreciate one Twitterer for pointing me toward some of the things for this post. Sadly, I cannot recommend following him overall; it would probably be like the frog asking the alligator for a ride across a stream, or similar anecdotes about taking a scorpion too close to one's breast.

==

Howie at Down with Tyranny also won't tell you that Bryce's DCCC national endorsement, like several others in House primaries (think of TX-07) has pissed off activist local Democrats. But Vice will tell you that, as well as tell you other issues that Bryce has, like stretching the truth in various ways.

That includes a link to a NYT piece about buying Twitter followers.

One Texas doctor who doesn't know causal correlation — do Big Media check on this?

Dr. Howard Marcus, lying with statistics.
(Somebody alert Mark Twain.)

Note even if it were a tapeworm and bit him in the stomach. (He's an internist, hence the riff on the old joke.)

From a news release:

The Texas Medical Board licensed a record 3,994 new physicians  for the fiscal year that ended last month. 

The board licensed 400 more doctors this year than last, said Austin internist Howard Marcus, M.D, chairman of Texas Alliance For Patient Access. 

“The number of new physicians applying for a Texas license also reached an all-time high,” said Dr. Marcus, “tallying 12% more than last year’s previous record high,” he said. 

The state’s fiscal year begins in September and ends in August. Nearly every month was a record setter. September, the first month of the fiscal year, was the only month that did not produce a record number of new applications for that given month, said Marcus. 

Texas has averaged licensing 3,254 new physicians each year since the passage of lawsuit reforms 11 years ago.

“The state medical board is now licensing twice as many doctors per year than in the medical crisis years before lawsuit reforms were enacted,” said Marcus.

Tort "reform" had nothing to do with that, at least nothing that's provable. (It also didn't reduce doctors' insurance rates that much.)

Statistical correlation does not imply causal correlation. Between that, loose p-values on medical research and other things, this is why I sometimes hesitate to call doctors "scientists." Marcus needs to read XKCD if he cares, which he doesn't, as I note below.

What probably did cause the increase?

Uhh, Texas population growth?

Texas' population was 22.1 million in 2003. It's now about 26.7 million. Or 20 percent more than 11 years ago.

Of course, since Marcus has been writing columns for Texans for Lawsuit Reform since 2006, and the Texas Alliance for Patient Access is an Astroturf group, he's not exactly a disinterested person when it comes to implying causal correlation exists where it probably doesn't. (He's also been touting this new physician growth every year, meaning this con game is nothing new, and doing similar on things like out-of-state physician recruitment.)

Astroturfing another reason to be skeptical of social media as journalism

The example Josh Marshall cites is pretty clumsy, but this was just an early attempt. What happens when astroturfers get more careful about their fingerprints?

Astroturfers say ‘get Reps. off prepared script’ on health

Ahh, the irony alert and hypocrisy alert daily double at work.

If anybody has a “prepared script,” including a prepared script for disrespect and intimidation, it’s astroturfing corporate groups and their far-right political action group fellow travelers.

“Pack the hall,” said a strategy memo circulated by the Web site Tea Party Patriots that instructed, “Yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

“Get him off his prepared script and agenda,” the memo continued. “Stand up and shout and sit right back down.”

That said, liberals need to respond with firmness but WITHOUT violence; we do not need more Russ Carnahan town halls.

Here's why Cornyn knows Obama is telling truth about town hall thuggery

Texas Sen. John Cornyn wants President Barack Obama to stop talking about an “enemies list” behind disruptions of Congressional town halls and such.

The idea that Cornyn, who sometimes flirts with the edges of reality, thinks Obama’s asking people to report GOP and ’winger Astroturf groups lies and misinformation about healthcare issues is sending secret information to the president, this one is so laughable, in part, because Cornyn knows tea-baggers better from personal experience:



First, Obama the (actual) violator of civil liberties could have his telco immunity buddy, AT&T, team up with the NSA and take care of this in secret if he really were of the mindset Cornyn attributes to him.

Second, people can send their e-mails through routers or anonymizers.

Third, they can stop sending lying e-mails! Hey, there’s an idea for Whackjob Cornyn!

Rather, I hope he ups the ante. Cornyn’s whining shows this might just stick. And, having seen these nutbars protest against HIM on the Fourth of July, he knows what they are like.

A longer video reminder of what Cornyn knows about these thuggery:



More information about actual thuggery on the jump.

In St. Louis, Rep. Russ Carnahan was the target, though liberals were prepared. The result? A big pre town-hall fracas, which included multiple apparent “assault by cop” actions against healthcare supporters.

Remember, police generally come from the more conservative elements of society.

In Wisconsin, a protestor claming to be “just a mom” with “not affiliated with any political party” gets exposed as a big liar — a member of the Republican National Committee.

And good on Steve Pearlstein of the WaPost for calling the lies of folks like this “a flat-out lie.”

By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

And he closes with a note to the Jim DeMints of the world:

If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.

Indeed, if we want to put this in terms of raw political calculus, this can be a counter-shift as big or bigger than Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” only this time, generational.

And now, astroturf-teabag intimidation spreads to unions

The latest? The St. Louis headquarters of the SEIU has received a threatening phone call – along with additional threats by Twitter.

Astroturf-teabag intimidation spreads to unions

The latest? The St. Louis headquarters of the SEIU has received a threatening phone call – along with additional threats by Twitter.

Obama-Baucus healthcare sellout continues - why the astroturfing?

Texas Sen. John Cornyn claims President Barack Obama is assembling an “enemies list” about people behind disruptions of Congressional town halls and such.

Byron York joins Cornyn on the conspiracy theory of a secret presidential database being compiled.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele refuses to denounce any violence, intimidation or threats associated with these groups.

Why are they even worried?

Mod Max Baucus and his Senate Finance Committee Gang of Six have put the finishing touches on gutting the public option on health insurance. And, if you expect a federal government alternatingly lead by neolib Dems and yahoo GOPers to actually regulate health insurance companies tightly enough to save us all money, I have some palm trees in Baucus' Montana to sell you, complete with lobbyist funding to buy them.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Team Obama continues its sellout to Big Pharma.

So relax, folks. You are going to get screwed; the astroturfers could have saved their Tea Party money; the lobbyist money worked just fine by itself.

More of the truth Whackjob Cornyn doesn't want told on healthcare

Texas Sen. John Cornyn wants President Barack Obama to stop talking about an “enemies list” behind disruptions of Congressional town halls and such.

The idea that Cornyn, who sometimes flirts with the edges of reality, thinks Obama’s asking people to report GOP and ’winger Astroturf groups lies and misinformation about healthcare issues is sending secret information to the president, this one is so laughable.

Anyway, here’s some more of the truth Cornyn doesn’t want you to hear about these demagogues:

North Carolina Rep. Brad Miller has had threats on his life and won’t do town halls.

Whackjob Cornyn asks Obama to stop telling the truth

Texas Sen. John Cornyn wants President Barack Obama to stop talking about an “enemies list” behind disruptions of Congressional town halls and such.

The idea that Cornyn, who sometimes flirts with the edges of reality, thinks Obama’s asking people to report GOP and ’winger Astroturf groups lies and misinformation about healthcare issues is sending secret information to the president, this one is so laughable…

Especially since Cornyn knows better from personal experience, just a month ago!



First, Obama the (actual) violator of civil liberties could have his telco immunity buddy, AT&T, team up with the NSA and take care of this in secret if he really were of the mindset Cornyn attributes to him.

Second, people can send their e-mails through routers or anonymizers.

Third, they can stop sending lying e-mails! Hey, there’s an idea for Whackjob Cornyn!

Rather, I hope he ups the ante. Cornyn’s whining shows this might just stick. And, having seen these nutbars protest against HIM on the Fourth of July, he knows what they are like.

Follow-up thoughts here,
here and here.

Update, Aug. 6: Astroturf & tea-bag ‘political terrorist’ action continues:

In St. Louis, Rep. Russ Carnahan was the target, though liberals were prepared. The result? A big pre town-hall fracas, which included multiple apparent “assault by cop” actions against healthcare supporters.

Remember, police generally come from the more conservative elements of society.

In Wisconsin, a protestor claming to be “just a mom” with “not affiliated with any political party” gets exposed as a big liar — a member of the Republican National Committee.

And good on Steve Pearlstein of the WaPost for calling the lies of folks like this “a flat-out lie.”

By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

And he closes with a note to the Jim DeMints of the world:

If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.

Indeed, if we want to put this in terms of raw political calculus, this can be a counter-shift as big or bigger than Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” only this time, generational.

Corporate taxes whine proof astroturfers behind protestors

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never, myself, heard the average John or Jane Doe whine about federal corporate income taxes being too high.

But, an alleged group of John and Jane Does did whine about exactly that to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Congressman Michael Arcuri at a news conference.

And, this Don Jeror is no innocent. He’s a, Tea Party organizer, and we know those events, even with “real people” present, are ultimately astroturfed.

If you’re on Twitter, give him a Tweet: @DonJeror.