Crooked Media - What A Day: Thinking outside the Fox

 -Madison Cawthorn, language and biology master

In retreat from their failed attempt to encircle Kyiv, Russian forces left disturbing evidence of war crimes they committed against Ukrainian civilians, all as a key ally of Vladimir Putin maintained his authoritarian grip on power in eastern Europe.
 

• Horrifying footage and images from Bucha depict mass graves and bodies strewn in the streets ater Ukraine retook control of the Kyiv suburb from Russian occupiers. Russia reportedly suffered heavy casualties when it first invaded Bucha, so the images also show widespread destruction and abandoned military hardware. The devastation there matches reporting from other parts of Ukraine, which Russian soldiers expected to seize easily, but have since abandoned, leaving spiteful carnage in their wake. Visiting Bucha today, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian war crimes make it “very difficult to negotiate” for peace.
   
• Facing global condemnation for these atrocities, including the expulsion of diplomats and the promise of new sanctions, the Putin regime has responded by lying its ass off. Russian officials claimed the carnage occurred after they abandoned Bucha, calling the massacre there a “hoax,” and a false-flag operation. They even demanded an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss the  “provocations of Ukrainian radicals.” But satellite footage shows that the bodies strewn about the streets in Bucha have been there for weeks, through the occupation.
   
• These developments lend credibility to assessments that Russia is “cleansing” parts of Ukraine, forcing Ukrainian citizens to relocate to and live in Russia against their will. In remarks last week the U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe told member states, “Russia continues laying waste to Ukraine’s cities, relentlessly shelling and bombing, and impeding urgent humanitarian access at the risk of starving to death those who remain in their homes. It is inhuman. And now we are starting to see more and more reports that Russia is forcibly deporting Ukrainian citizens to Russia.”

Despite all this, Putin sycophants haven’t exactly been chased out of public life. 

• Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister and staunch Putin loyalist Viktor Orban won a fourth consecutive election on Sunday, and celebrated by casting Zelensky, the European Union, George Soros, and the “international media” as his “opponents.” (The  triple parentheses were implied.) His victory and continued partnership with Putin have raised calls to expel Hungary from the E.U. and NATO. 
   
• The Russian people themselves also seem to be getting comfortable with their country’s new pariah status. A mix of attrition (war opponents fleeing the country) and backlash to the west among those who’ve remained has driven support for the war upward, presumably reducing pressure on Putin to find a way out of the mess he’s made.

Check out the latest episode of Offline! This week, the host of Emmy-award winning Full Frontal on TBS Samantha Bee joins to discuss how she’s burned out from our worsening political discourse, and offers some motherly advice for future Oscars attendees. New episodes of Offline drop every Sunday wherever you get your podcasts.

Senate Democrats had to delay a key procedural vote to advance Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination for several hours (don’t worry, they advanced it) because a canceled flight left one member of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA), stranded in Los Angeles. The committee is evenly divided 11-11, and zero committee Republicans favor reporting her nomination to the full Senate, which meant every Democrat had to be present to expedite the process. It was a vivid, if ultimately not-so-consequential reminder of how tenuous the Democratic Party’s control over Congress is, and how important it is for Democrats to advance their priorities quickly while they can. As if to underscore just how nasty things will get if or when Democrats lose their majority, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) used the day’s proceedings to announce that if Republicans controlled the Senate, they wouldn’t have even given KBJ a hearing.

• President Biden reportedly believes Donald Trump should be prosecuted for crimes he committed while trying to overturn the government, and has complained in private that Attorney General Merrick Garland is too much like a “ponderous judge” than “a prosecutor who is willing to take decisive action over the events of Jan. 6.”
   
• Senate Democrats will try to revive the corpse of Build Back Better one last time and get it passed before spring is over, this time by caving to all of Joe Manchin’s demands, but (surprise!) it’s unclear whether those demands are fixed or a moving target.
   
• In other Senate scrambling, Democrats and Republicans have reached a deal on a new COVID-19 mitigation package, but they’ve completely stripped out funding for vaccinating the world, which Republicans pretend to believe needs to be paid for.
   
• Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Mitt Romney (R-UT) are the second and third Republicans to announce they’ll vote to confirm KBJ.
   
• Police have arrested a suspected mass shooter who killed six people and wounded 12 others in Sacramento on Sunday.
   
• Jen Psaki will step down as White House press secretary and begin a new job as an MSNBC contributor. 
   
• Elon Musk used his huge Twitter account to trash Twitter for days, then, when the price dropped, he bought a 9.2 percent stake in the company, making him its largest passive shareholder, and a quick billion or so dollars on paper when the share price rose again.
   
• The CDC will undertake a one-month self-review aimed at fixing weaknesses exposed by the pandemic, which may or may not include not letting another sociopath become president and/or injecting itself with bleach.
   
• DirecTV will dump right-wing trash network OAN tomorrow.
   
• One way to fight inflation would be to tax CEOs who gave themselves a median pay increase of almost a million dollars a year last year, while whining about inflation.
   
• The Brennan Center seems to have whiffed on an opportunity to secure federal funds for secure elections, in a misbegotten desire not to distract attention from the Freedom to Vote Act, and so we’re probably stuck with neither.
   
• With condolences to Los Angeles, it looks like Mayor Eric Garcetti will not get to be U.S. ambassador to India after all. 
   
• Will Smith has resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for you know why.
   
• Sarah Palin announced her candidacy for the House of Representatives and Donald Trump instantly endorsed her.
   
• Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) will speak at Trump’s forthcoming rally in Selma, NC, after getting reprimanded by House GOP leadership for “lying” about Republican “cocaine orgies.”

We’ve known for a long time that the availability of Fox News in a community gives the Republican Party a measurable advantage in elections. Now we know more about why, thanks to a new study whose findings are fascinating if not surprising. The Fox propaganda effect works not just by keeping right-wing Americans in a state of constant agitation, but by actually changing the way they think and making them believe things that aren’t true. Researchers gathered a sample of regular Fox viewers, and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead, employing measures to ensure their compliance with the deal. After just a month, the people paid to swap Fox out for CNN changed their views on issues (such as by becoming less hostile to voting by mail) and grew less likely than the control group to believe falsehoods (like that the U.S. did a worse job controlling the COVID-19 pandemic than many other countries, and that Democrats enjoy it when police officers get shot). The findings lend empirical heft to anecdotal evidence that recovered Fox addicts become happier and improve relationships with their families, and suggest it might be valuable for people who know Fox addicts to experiment with different ways to help them wean themselves off right-wing media. It also supports President Biden’s reported belief that Rupert Murdoch is the most dangerous man in the world: Fuck you, Rupert, you suck.

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Amazon workers at a Staten Island, NY, warehouse won their union drive!

Stacey Abrams has centered her Georgia gubernatorial campaign around advocacy for Medicaid expansion, an issue Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) rode to victory in his own successful statewide election there.

Colorado has enshrined the right to abortion.

Two key tech executives and the chief legal officer have resigned from Donald Trump’s scammy social media company, Truth Social, which appears to be in rapid collapse, haha.