Smooth Operetta

51 days, folks.  Fifty-one days.

• The Tooth Fairy called.  That last tooth crumbled.  Please leave $1,000 under the pillow.  

  Camerota explained that the false claim that President Obama suggested people go out and commit voter fraud was drummed up on Fox Business Network, with deceptively edited video.

  I understand that there are intelligent, non-foaming Trump supporters out there, but apparently none of them ever cross the path of anyone in any media.
• Driftglass, taking it further:

  The doctored video is there, the doctored transcript is there, and the original transcript is there, and what is abundantly clear is that Fox News' Stuart Varney knowingly perpetrated a massive fraud on his viewers and that if he worked at a reputable news outfit and not Roger Ailes' Wingnut Whorehouse and Vomitorium he would have been shitcanned immediately.

• Why the Republicans want to destroy Social Security/Medicare (and Obamacare), as explained by Lance Mannion.

  Of course there’s nothing at all religious in it except for the self-righteous zeal with which they impose it on the body politic. It’s rank hypocrisy. An excuse to do whatever they want to make and pocket gobs of money they didn’t earn all on their own through their individual enterprise and hard work. It’s canned language they can use to explain away their naked greed and justify their social Darwinism. They’ve done a good job of proselytizing. There’s been no shortage of willing converts. The political media seems to teem with them. There are hardly enough loaves and fishes to feed them. How this all developed is the subject of Kevin Kruse’s indispensable One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, but to sum up quickly here, it was a response to the New Deal, an attempt to counter Franklin Roosevelt’s casting the New Deal in a Christian light.
  
  Ever since, the Republican party has been devoted to preaching their revised version of the gospel in which Jesus commands the storing up of treasures on earth and the parable of the sheep and the goats is inverted, as if he said “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters you do for me and my capricious, vindictive, sky-demon father.”
  
  A Christian nation is one in which the hungry starve, the sick go uncared for, and strangers are turned away, all for their own blessed good.
  
  End of sermon.

  There are links in original.
  
• Via skippy, Chattanooga's experience with municipal gigabit-per-second fiber internet network.