Where's Mitch?
Today’s rant is sponsored by Ground News.
I’ve been paying more attention to how differently the same story gets covered depending on where you read it—especially lately, when everything feels optimized for speed and outrage instead of context.
Take this one—hundreds of outlets picked up growing concerns about the rising cost of the Iran war and the billions more it could require.
Nation of Change says “Hegseth puts the Iran war’s cost at $37.5 billion as the Pentagon seeks tens of billions more”
Bizpac Review states “Hegseth puts the Iran war’s cost at $37.5 billion, though analysts believe the true cost is much higher”
Same story—completely different narratives.
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See how the left and right cover the same story, what each side emphasizes or leaves out, and discover overlooked stories in the Blindspot Feed, which surfaces coverage disproportionately reported by either side.
I’ve been a paying user since before they ever sponsored Endless Urgency. I use it because it makes it a lot harder to be misled. They’re completely subscriber funded so there are no corporate interests pushing a narrative on what you see.
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Mitch McConnell has been missing for forty-five days, and it sure seems like almost nobody in Washington actually cares.
Republican senators are fleeing down hallways from content creators asking them the simplest possible questions: *Where’s your coworker? Do you think we should have term limits?* The whole thing is an embarrassing indictment of how Washington works right now.
They know the American people are angry about this. But they also know the American people are busy — drinking from a firehose, barely able to keep their own lives together — so they figure they can get away with it. And in the two-tiered system of government and justice we’ve built, they’re right. They can.
McConnell’s family knows they don’t have to be honest with the American people about his health, because nothing will come of it, even if people are mad. His staff know they can be complicit in a cover-up — lie, and keep insisting he’s coming back to work — when most of us believe he’s probably never coming back. His colleagues know the voters won’t punish them for it, and they want to stay in office as long as humanly possible.
I mean, how many of these Republican senators out there right now opposing age limits are doing it only because they see themselves serving well into their nineties? The way Chuck Grassley does?
And the media knows they can keep getting invited to the parties without ever having to ask the hard questions.
Meanwhile, the voters are left holding the bag. Right now the people of Kentucky have half the representation in the United States Senate that they’re owed — at a moment when the president is a fascist asshole waging an illegal war and wrecking our economy. Don’t you think the people of Kentucky deserve equal representation with every other state? I sure as hell do. Even knowing they’d probably elect somebody I fundamentally disagree with on almost everything. Because fundamentally, this is a good-government issue.
Mid-rant note: this section is sponsored by Ground News.
I’ve started paying more attention to how the same story can feel completely different depending on who’s reporting it. Ground News makes that easy to see by showing coverage from across the political spectrum and pointing out what certain outlets leave out.
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This is exactly why we need a full-scale overhaul of how we run our government and our elections. We need term limits. We need age limits. We need radical transparency of financial records, so we can weed out corruption. We need radical transparency of health records, so we know whether our elected officials are physically and mentally up for the job. We need to overturn Citizens United. We need to disclose which influencers are being paid by which campaigns — because it’s getting harder and harder to figure out who *isn’t* on somebody’s payroll. We need to root out foreign money in our elections. We need to ban super PACs. There is so much shit we need to do.
But here’s the bottom line. If you’re angry about this obvious, blatant cover-up of Mitch McConnell’s health — if you don’t believe the story they’re telling, and I certainly don’t; I think the man is probably dead, or at the very least incapable of doing the job of a United States senator — then understand this: it only happens because we live in a country where there is no accountability for the rich and the powerful. If you know the right person, if you have enough money, if you can put a little money in Donald Trump’s back pocket, you can get away with anything.
All these people know they’re going to get away with it. They know we’ll be mad, and they know we’ll move on to the next thing we’re mad about. And I’m still sitting here wondering who the hell paid off Brett Kavanaugh’s credit card debt and bought his baseball tickets — because I never got an answer for that, and I’d still like one.
So get angry. Hold onto that anger — but turn it into something productive. Get out into your community. Take care of your family. Go run for office. We need good people to run, and we need a lot of them, because the truth is a lot of us are going to run, and a lot of us are going to lose. But goddamnit — it’d be good if a few of us won every now and again. Maybe then we can make the system a little bit better and actually fix this.
Don’t let them win. And don’t give in to complacency.
Bret Kavanaugh’s mortgage was also paid off.
He's still Mitching in action. Beshear needs to appoint a Democrat to fill the seat NOW and let the Republicans prove MM is still with us and with it or not.