The Chain

"Listen to the wind blow..."

• Excerpts from Kurt Vonnegut's speech at SUNY Albany, 1972.  Via AlterNet.
• Chauncey DeVega analyzes Trump's Phoenix speech and issues ominous warning.

  Trump does not believe in freedom of the press. He wants to overturn standing political norms, values, traditions and institutions in order to return to a fictive past. Trump is a militant nationalist. Trump’s movement is based on social dominance behavior and authoritarianism. He is a strongman and leader of a cult of personality that emphasizes action, strength and hypermasculine energy. A direct appeal or encouragement to violence against the Other was one of the few remaining criteria for fascism that Donald Trump had not yet fulfilled. His speech in Phoenix has finally checked off that empty box.

• The headline is "CNN Admits They Serve As Parrots For The RNC."  Crooks and Liars, with video.  Karoli Kuns notes:

  Let me inject some perspective.
  
  It has been 174 days since Merrick Garland was nominated to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died 205 days ago, but no cable news network has put up a countdown clock for that, nor devoted much more than a passing mention of it over the past several weeks.
  
  No cable news network has complained that the American people are not being served by a politically motivated and cynical Republican leadership in the Senate actively blocking the process of government from going forward.
  
  No, instead they're nattering about whether questions on a plane means the countdown clock to a press conference should be reset.

• Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall examines why the New York Times seems to be ignoring or downplaying possible Trump illegality:

  At the risk of stating the obvious, these facts are textbook examples of the sort of political and prosecutorial corruption journalists are supposed to uncover. Trump used money to buy protection from the consequences of his bad acts from friendly politicians. He then tried to cover up his payment of protection money. And on top of all that he made the either bizarre or incompetent mistake of paying the protection money out of his Foundation - the money from which mostly comes from other people beside Trump.

• Driftglass on shifting public opinion.

  Because we here in the land of the free have some very recent and terrifying experience with how radically public opinion can be warped when you start with a base of, say, 30% of the public who are already brain-dead, believe-anything-Hannity-says, Conservative meat-puppets, and then you pile on top of that a Beltway media deeply committed to pounding Conservative talking points home day after day after day, regardless of how nonexistent the underlying facts may be.

• Comrade Misfit expressed what I thought about the death of Phyllis Schlafly. Who will not be memorialized in this space.