One comment that I frequently make that drives the trolls on that other site up a wall is how American politics isn’t really a right-left continuum. In reality, politics is more like a cursive “u”, with the two far ends of the spectrum approaching each other in a manner where the far-left and far-right are much closer to each other in their behaviors than they are to more moderate members of their self-proclaimed parties. Erik Hoffer noted this phenomenon in his book The True Believer, how for the Nazis, it was far easier to find converts among the Communist party of Germany than it was to recruit members from the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Likewise, it was far easier for the Communists to convince a Nazi to join their cause than it was to attract Social Democrats to communist ideology.

On January 21st, 2021, amid the shitshow over newly-sworn in QAnon adulteress Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s social media history being full of insane statements about school shootings being false flag attacks intended to turn public opinion in favor of gun control, Media Matters also found a comment of hers from 2018 agreeing with another Facebook user’s assertion that the September 11th, 2001 attacks where also a secret plot orchestrated by the Bush Administration.

On Saturday, Greene tweeted this:

May God bless the family and friends of those who were lost and God bless our first responders.

This is a day we #NeverForget pic.twitter.com/XvVMfKQLm3

— Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) September 11, 2021

Greene’s hypocrisy on the matter here is pretty cut and dry. Surely her fans will argue that it’s consistent, that Marjie is saying “Never forget [the false flag attacks on 9/11/2001]” but the rest of us see a pretty blatant lie by omission. It’s the simplest example of a shift that I personally believe has gone largely unsaid in the center-left media world of these last few years: The fact that 9/11 truthers (and adherents of other fringe conspiracy movements of the first decade of the 21st century), once deeply paranoid of and hostile to one Republican president’s administration became some of the most fanatic supporters of the next Republican president.

“Congratulations to Rudy Giuliani (for the 20th time!), the greatest Mayor in the history of New York City, for having shown such leadership and doing such an incredible job during and after the attack on our Nation!” says the Orange Pharaoh in a statement.

https://youtu.be/w8JMajU52Us

Baltimore Sun: “An Eastern Shore judge, who had been on a leave of absence for more than a month amid an investigation into illicit images of children, took his own life Friday morning as federal agents moved in to arrest him. Judge Jonathan G. Newell, 50, was pronounced dead at 6:43 a.m. from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced. A judge since 2016 and before that Caroline County’s top prosecutor for more than a decade, he was to be taken into custody on federal charges of sexual exploitation of a child, prosecutors said.”

“A boy that Newell took on a hunting trip on Hoopers Island discovered a hidden camera in the bathroom on July 23, and his parents reported it to police, which The Sun reported last week. When confronted by investigators, Newell is believed to have chewed up and swallowed a camera memory card, authorities said in a criminal complaint unsealed Friday. A neighbor of Newell posted pictures on Facebook saying the FBI was outside his Henderson, Md. home asking him to come out over a loudspeaker. The neighbor, Kimberly Keith, said that she heard flash bangs and what she believed to be gunshots, and later an ambulance. Newell, a Republican, has been Caroline County’s only Circuit Court judge, earning $174,433 annually. The county, population 33,000, also has an appointed family magistrate judge, and civil case examiners.”

A tweet sent on the @AP_Planner account about Saturday, Sept. 11, being the anniversary of a Nickelback album was deleted. The tweet was in poor taste.

— Onclusive Forward Planner (@OnclusivePlan) September 11, 2021

Earlier Friday the “AP Planner” account – a service geared toward news outlets for filler content like celebrity birthdays, seasonal housekeeping tips, and various other informational sundries – tweeted “Tomorrow: 20th anniversary of Nickelback releasing album ‘Silver Side Up’ (11 Sep)” which, for obvious reasons, was not ideal considering Saturday is the 20th anniversary of something else. Still, this being Nickelback, it’s not exactly clear what part they mean was the “poor taste”.

• Twenty years ago, we all went to bed blissfully unaware that our world would change forever the following morning.
• With Thursday’s announcement of vaccine requirements, Biden verbalized the frustration of the vast majority of Americans:  we did the right thing by getting vaccinated; now it’s time for the non-vaccinated conservatives to do what’s best for America.  They claim they would take a bullet for America, but they won’t take a shot.  
• Biden gave anti-vaxxers a choice with three options:  get vaccinated, get tested every week, or get a new job.  They’re now having a temper tantrum because they don’t want to make a responsible choice.
• Conservative pundits continue to harp on Biden’s December promise to get the coronavirus under control being defeated by the current surge.  Biden made the statement when the vaccine was just announced, not understanding tens of millions of people would be brainwashed to fight an effective vaccine.
  Read More ▶ “Random thoughts Friday, Volume XXXVI”

CNN: “France has become the latest European country – and the most significant tourism destination – to remove the United States from its safe travel list, following EU recommendations in the wake of a US Covid spike. A French government decree issued on Thursday bumped the United States and Israel from the country’s ‘green’ list, down to ‘orange,’ effectively prohibiting nonessential travel to France for unvaccinated visitors. Under France’s rules, unvaccinated travelers from either country will still be allowed in provided they have an essential reason for travel, however they’ll need a negative Covid-19 test before travel and must quarantine for seven days on arrival. France’s move follow restrictions imposed on US travelers from several other European destinations. Earlier this week, Spain changed its entry policy for arrivals from the US, requiring them to have a certificate proving double vaccination.”

“Following Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, and after the bloody Jan. 6 riot that Trump instigated, the 45th U.S. president immediately lost many of his ties to world leaders he once called ‘friends.’ However, Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who has modeled himself in Trump’s image, sought to keep the bromance alive. That’s something former President Trump, months after officially departing the White House, hasn’t forgotten, and has expressed some interest in returning the favor. This summer, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, Trump told confidants that he’s open to publicly endorsing Bolsonaro’s reelection, potentially at a mega-rally in Brazil where he and Bolsonaro could appear together side-by-side, to rail against what they each deem undesired election outcomes. Bolsonaro, who is widely expected to decisively fail in his reelection bid next year, has been preemptively spreading groundless claims of election ‘fraud,’ a strategy jarringly reminiscent of Trump’s failed coup in the United States.”

“Bolsonaro is expected to lose his 2022 reelection campaign to left-wing former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Ahead of that projected defeat, Bolsonaro is bringing Trump and the GOP’s baseless allegations of massive voter fraud to Brazil, part of an effort to claim victory even if he loses. ‘Here is a network of denialism in the United States that’s established after Trump loses that they can kind of plug themselves into,’ Pagliarini said. QAnon social media channels eagerly followed the Brazilian protests, casting them as ordinary Brazilians reclaiming their freedom from liberal elites. Right-wing blog The Gateway Pundit argued that pro-Bolsonaro protesters and Trump supporters were all part of a single global battle against so-called ‘corruption'” – Daily Beast.

In a Trafalgar poll for the Georgia Republican 2022 Senate primary, Herschel Walker gets 76% to his nearest challenger Gary Black’s 6%. Yeah, it’s a Trafalgar poll, but pricing in their MAGA dishonesty isn’t going to knock away 70% unless they literally completely made this up.

Beleaguered Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has initiated a lawsuit against the Richardson (Texas) Independent School District, one of the many school districts in the state that are defying Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s mask ban, the Dallas Morning News reports.

The RISD school board voted last week to support Superintendent Jeannie Stone’s order that students and staff are required to wear masks during in-person classes.  Stone made the mandate after one of the district’s elementary schools after a COVID outbreak that sent a sixth grader to the intensive care unit.

“Not only are superintendents across Texas openly violating state law, but they are using district resources—that ought to be used for teacher merit raises or other educational benefits—to defend their unlawful political maneuvering,” Paxton said in a statement.

Washington Post:  “A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the Internet to a Florida company in January — just minutes before President Trump left office — has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses.

“The program had drawn scrutiny because of its unusual timing, starting amid a politically charged changeover of federal power, and because of its enormous scale. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6 percent of a section of the Internet called IPv4. The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market.  Adding to the mystery, company registration records showed Global Resource Systems at the time was only a few months old, having been established in September 2020, and had no publicly reported federal contracts, no obvious public-facing website and no sign on the shared office space it listed as its physical address in Plantation, Fla. The company also did not respond to requests for comment, and the Pentagon did not announce the program or publicly acknowledge its existence until The Washington Post reported on it in April.

“And now it’s done. Kind of.”

“Britain is ‘now in for permanent shortages’ of popular food and drink items on the shelves, an industry chief declared today. Ian Wright, outgoing chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation, warned supply issues that have hit supermarkets, Nando’s and McDonald’s are ‘going to get worse’ as the labour market changes permanently after Covid. Mr Wright emphasised ‘these shortages don’t mean you’re going to run out of food’. But he warned incidents like no bottled water being available in the whole of eastern England could become more common. He added: ‘The UK shopper could have previously expected just about every product they want to be on shelf or in the restaurant all the time. ‘That’s over and I don’t think it’s coming back.'”

“It comes as the UK prepares to slap post-Brexit checks on imports from the EU in two stages from October 1 and January 1. The government is reportedly set to delay these checks – a move Mr Wright claimed could be announced within hours. He said ministers might think: ‘If we start implementing these changes from the start of October, we might risk Christmas being cancelled for the second year running.’ Asked if Christmas will be cancelled, he told an event hosted by the Institute for Government: ‘No, but it’s going to be different'” – The Mirror.

UPDATE 10:41 PM EDT 9/10/2021: The AP deleted the tweet, but screenshots are forever-ish.

Miami Herald:  “Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration won approval on Friday to put a hold on a Leon County judge’s ruling that said the state could not enforce a ban on strict mask mandates in schools.  The 1st District Court of Appeal agreed to a state request to reinstate a stay on Judge John Cooper’s ruling amid objections from a group of parents who said the move could cause ‘irreparable harm’ to their children amid a rise of COVID-19 cases.

“The decision means the state can continue to punish school officials who impose mask mandates without a parent opt-out.  Cooper ruled last month that the state could not penalize districts that impose strict mask mandates if they demonstrate the policy is ‘reasonable’ and necessary to achieve a ‘compelling state interest’.”

“’Upon our review of the trial court’s final judgment and the operative pleadings, we have serious doubts about standing, jurisdiction, and other threshold matters,’ the order states. ‘These doubts significantly militate against vacating the automatic stay, the stay should have been left in place pending appellate review.’”

ABC News: “An alleged victim of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein filed a lawsuit against Prince Andrew of Britain on Monday, accusing the embattled 61-year-old royal of sexually abusing her at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and elsewhere when she was under the age of 18, according to the complaint. The lawsuit, filed by Virginia Roberts Giuffre in federal court in New York, comes almost two years to the day that Epstein died in a New York jail while he was awaiting trial on conspiracy and child sex trafficking charges. The legal action also comes just days before the expiration date of a New York state law that permits alleged victims of childhood sexual abuse to file civil claims that might otherwise be barred by statutes of limitations. ‘If she doesn’t do it now, she would be allowing him to escape any accountability for his actions,’ Giuffre’s attorney, David Boies, chairman of Boies, Schiller Flexner, told ABC News. ‘And Virginia is committed to trying to avoid situations where rich and powerful people escape any accountability for their actions.'”

Meet Dave Daubenmire.  (He’s being played at 2-times normal speed because you really don’t want to listen to three minutes of him.)  Normally, he wouldn’t merit a second glance, but this high school football coach turned preacher man from Ohio is an ardent anti-vaxxer upset that he doesn’t know what’s in the FDA-approved vaccine.  Like many podcasters, he’s vehemently anti-science even though he took a three-week hiatus from Pass The Salt Ministries earlier this year after falling ill with an unspecified illness.  This one goes further, advertising on his website how to get out of vaccine requirements through a convenient religious exemption.

His previous exhortations–like the time he declared, “A woman’s got no business being a cop”–are definitely mockable, but his rant from this week’s podcast is classic Know-Nothing conservative extremism.  Y’see, because he claims he’s not taking the vaccine because he doesn’t know what’s in it, he lists off the nutritional supplements he takes, including something called “NAC” which, he declares, “if you don’t get some of it in your ass, you’re gonna be dead.”  (Fact check:  everyone’s eventually “gonna be dead” whether they take NAC or not.)  After stumbling through other supplements–“1,000 megagrams [sic], meg… mega….m.g.’s, whatever the hell that means”–he holds up a bottle of copper bisglycinate, saying “Every day for a year, I’ve taken copper bisglycinate. I don’t even know what it is, but a doctor told me to take it.”

New York Daily News: “Officials on Friday said that an outage last month that crippled the subways and left passengers stranded was caused by a worker who accidentally pressed a power switch. Riders of the city’s numbered and lettered trains were stuck throughout the city Aug. 29 when a power outage left them stranded on trains in underground tunnels for more than an hour. Rescue crews had to be dispatched to guide the frightened and frustrated passengers to safety.”

“Gov. Hochul, in one of her first official acts, vowed to get to the bottom of the failure. ‘New Yorkers deserve absolute confidence in a fully functioning subway system, and it is our job to restore that confidence,’ Hochul said in a statement. Engineers examined the breakdown, and in the end, blamed it on human error that appeared to have been easily preventable. ‘The reports revealed that the precipitating cause of the loss of power at the New York City Transit Rail Control Center was the byproduct of a manually-activated power-off switch on one of the building’s power distribution units. Preliminary indications suggest that the emergency push button might have been accidentally pressed since a plastic guard that would prevent accidental activation was missing.'”

An Alaska state senate legislative district will go without representation until at least January because its elected representative has been barred from flying on Alaska Airlines due to her repeated refusal to wear a mask on flights, the Associated Press reports.

Republican Lora Reinbold, who is supposed to represent state senate district 26, requested an excusal from the current special session of the legislature and all future sessions until January 15 because she doesn’t know how to travel from her home of Eagle River, a neighborhood in Anchorage, to the state capital, Juneau.  Even though there are state-financed ferries and over-land routes, Reinbold apparently requires air travel.

The Alaska Legislature is in special session to determine how to divide the socialist dividend the state confiscates from oil companies to distribute annually to the citizens of the state.