Raw Story

I want to borrow some of your valuable time today to explain how I would not only save the faltering MSNBC, but also help it positively thrive, all while putting Republicans’ ongoing attack on America and our flickering Democracy on the front burner of the national discussion.

I admit that I come to all this as an unlikely savior.

As a curmudgeonly newspaperman, I have not been a fan of 24/7 cable news ever since it so unfortunately came into existence. I mean, what in the hell prompted us to think we needed “BREAKING NEWS” shoveled at us all day via these oh-so-sweet and handsome television toothies to further complicate our busy lives?

Much better newspaper professionals packaged all you needed to know in a neat, tight bundle delivered at your doorstep so you could process it all with your coffee in the morning, or an extra-dry martini after work. And if you needed a stiff chaser, there was always Walter Cronkite kicking around to serve it to you straight.

When it was clear the never-ending news blaring from our TV sets was here to stay, I let go this stellar quote in the newsroom one gloomy afternoon: “Turn that shit off. Nobody has time to watch this amateur crap all day.”

Well, it turns out I was wrong about all that, and I’ll spare you what I said about the Internet when it barged into our lives, because chances are you’d quit reading right here and now.

(I did think the Beatles would be a major hit when they came long, so occasionally my predictions hit in spectacular fashion.)

Ever since the latest godawful election night in America, MSNBC’s ratings have been in the toilet, with some parts of their programming dropping audience share by nearly 50 percent. Turns out, many viewers aren’t happy with their appeasement of the American-attacking Trump in some parts of their 24/7 programming, or their attempt at “fair and balanced” news coverage that preceded the election by normalizing a hardcore racist who writes love letters to dictators. Then there was the not-so-subtle banging on the Democratic Party by some of their mouthy, daytime anchors, who just couldn’t acknowledge the party was correct on nearly every single major issue, but ironically lacked the bandwidth to tout their stellar work.

There’s speculation that MSNBC’s ratings dive will slow when the America-attacking Trump is sworn in on January 20th, and all the terrible things he ran on officially become all-too real. Good people are just tired right now, and trying to claim the next two months for themselves, before all the blood righteously pumps from their hearts with a gush straight into their exploding heads.

Fox News went through a similar down cycle after Joe Biden beat the America-attacker in 2020. The right-wing propaganda station lost lots of its viewers, but they all returned in time.

I am not sure that will be the case here — my shaky history of predictions aside.

The gods at Comcast, who own MSNBC, have announced they have plans to “spin off” the network, along with some other channels in their vast catalogue into a separate company. Nobody knows what in the hell all this means, but in researching this write, I can tell you there are a s----ton of “media insiders” who aren’t shy about making semi-educated guesses.

Some have speculated whatever it is that is spun will be sold to the highest bidder — maybe even Fox’s Rupert Murdoch. Others say the place will just look a little different, but remain under current ownership.

Only one thing seems crystal clear: America has never needed reliable, left-leaning news programming more than it does right now.

The notorious messaging problem wasn’t as prevalent for Democrats this past election cycle, but platforming their message was. They (we) simply no longer have the bandwidth to compete with the Republican’s myriad industrial pollutants that poison the air with their lies. They are literally everywhere. They control the radio airways, our TV channels, and the digital media. Billionaires like the grotesque Elon Musk are throwing their money and their allegiances to fascists like Vladimir Putin to help finish off America for good with their odious, never-ending lies.

ALSO READ: Trump is taking the mask off after lying to us for more than a year

Our corporate media is now officially disgraceful, and failed to do its job by giving the greatest internal threat to America since the Civil War the attention it deserved. Democracy and our rights as Americans are hanging precariously by a thread, and these incompetent, bought-off boobs in the working press are in large part to blame for it. Regular visitors to this space will know how I feel about all this and them, so for the sake of time, I’ll just leave it at that for now.

The communications landscape has been turned completely on its head, and liberals’ rigid, straight up approach to reaching people is honorable in its intent and embarrassing in its execution and results. Unless and until this is fixed and pronto, Democrats and left-leaners in this country are in deep, deep, trouble.

We are losing the communications battle, but if MSNBC would just get the hell out of its own way, we could start to reclaim the high ground.

Here’s how that happens:

• Start listening to your audience, MSNBC. They hate you right now. They believe you have failed and betrayed them. Stop trying to be some “both-sides-do-it” news organization, and start capturing the millions of people who are starving for truth, and know a revolting racist when they see and hear one. Stop trying to be too many different things to too many different audiences. Immediately dump the half-baked garbage on your station — like, Morning Joe, for instance. Seriously, what is it that show supposed to be doing? What crucial niche is it fulfilling? Is showcasing two lily-white people kissing the two-ton ass of a dictator that important? Their stupid show bleeds into a significant problem I’ll delve into a bit more shortly: What the hell is your penchant for recruiting Republican refugees as headliners on your station? It’s disgusting. Start listening to what your audience wants immediately. Start giving them what they want instead of what you think they should want. It’s haughty as hell. They, not you, are all that matters.
• Screw it, let’s deal with this Republican problem right now. The station is littered with them. Do these people really think their noxious party is coming back from the America-attacking Trump? Is being a part of the gruesome Tea Party movement something to be proud of and looked back on with reverence? Are trying to kill abortion rights and Obamacare a badge of honor? Were things “great” for them when they had the House and Senate back then? And former staffers for the hideous George W. Bush are everywhere. Here’s a bulletin: He is a terrible, terrible man. A damn war criminal. A complete idiot. I mean, what the hell am I supposed to make of all this, people? Look, I’m not here to entirely wipe ‘em out, but how is it they have ascended to such loud platforms in the Democratic communications ranks? The Lincoln Project, despite some pretty significant hiccups, has done some good work, but nobody deserves extra credit for simply doing the right thing and turning away from a revolting political party that falls at the fat, little feet of a complete lying racist, deviant, who assaults women and our country and brags about it. But MSNBC can’t seem to get enough these old, white Republican men, and as an old, white liberal man I find it really creepy and disturbing. Here’s what I’d like to hear them all say, “We were wrong. The party we supported is terrible, it really is. Turns out the folks on the Left were right about us all these years. I fervently hope they will accept our apologies.” Otherwise, they can hit the road, and shouldn’t be trusted. I have warned before that many of them are just dying to do the wrong thing again, and go back to their revolting party.
• Don’t be shy about letting your audience know that you are direct counter-programing to the ghastly Fox network, and in fact are taking them and their bulls--- head on. Make a point of destroying them. Belittle them. Fact-check the hell out of them. This will be delightfully easy to do and so much damn fun to watch. WE NEED SOME FUN, DAMMIT. Say what you will about Murdoch’s odious network, but it has succeeded beyond the ancient man’s wildest dreams. There is no America-attacking Trump without Fox. Period. They are ratings stalwarts that traffic in lies and are expert at exploiting what is buried in their audience’s cold, white hearts. They are proof as Mark Twain once quipped, that “a lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Call them out on this 24/7.
• Focus. Make it clear as day you are 100 percent, left-leaning programming that proudly and unswervingly stands for women’s right, human rights, voters’ rights, environmental rights, workers’ rights, healthcare rights, and Social Security and Medicare rights. In other words, all the things the Democrats have stood for during the past 100 years. Except too many Americans don’t know that in 2024, because the message and that fact have been completely stolen. This horses--- that Republicans are running with the idea that they care about working-class Americans is grand larceny and should have NEVER been allowed to happen. By their dirty deeds, Republicans actually HATE working-class Americans. This has been a massive messaging problem for the Democratic Party, yes. But the pathetic mainstream media, with your help, MSNBC, helped people buy into this. Stop trying to do too many things half-decently, and home in on doing one thing great: spreading the truth.
• Give Pete Buttigieg a big, fat contract and as much airtime as he wants. I’m being partial here, but the dude might be the best communicator I have ever heard. Maybe even consider some Crossfire variant where he calmly smashes a conservative lackey to smithereens on a weekly basis. Again: WE NEED SOME DAMN FUN.
• Enough already with all these double-talking “legal experts” on your shows. This should need no explaining after what happened first with Bill Barr and the Mueller Report, and then Merrick Garland and the attack on America he ignored. It took forever to hear a single criticism of Garland from any of these on-air lawyers. Some still haven’t gotten there yet. They have been wrong about almost everything, but have proven the legal system in this country is in a complete shambles. The notion of law and order, and that nobody is above the law in the United States is a pathetic joke. Our Supreme Court is the most gory example of this. Give me legal people who say what need saying in plain, non-lawyered terms, and will be critical of other lawyers, and keep the rest of them the hell off the air.
• Create the biggest, ever-expanding, liberal, pro-Democracy bubble in history, and don’t apologize for it. If the worst thing that happens is that your growing audience is stuffed full of righteous, good-hearted people, while all hell comes raining down from the White House the next four years, things could be worse. You have a real opportunity here, MSNBC. Tens of millions of us, are looking for a place we can trust to hang our hats, while the storm rages. I suggest you get the hell out of your own way and just take it.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.

Immigrants seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border wall — which cost an estimated $20 million per mile to build — can wield simple power tools to saw their way through.

That's according to a new article in the Independent, which added that in some southern Arizona sections, severed pillars of the famous border wall can be pushed open by hand. In other sections of the state, the terrain is too rugged to build and the wall stands unconnected.

During Donald Trump's 2024 campaign, his favorite slogan, "Build the wall," never came up. Now, there's a question about whether he's giving up the cause.

The Independent recalled the longest government shutdown in history, triggered by Trump's demand for funding for his border wall. Ultimately, he got it. Still, the "wall" he promised hasn't been built. But it doesn't mean he will return to ensure the structure is built.

Instead of the wall, "Trump now wants a "bloody" mass deportation operation immediately removing millions of people, including by potentially reviving family separation," the report quoted.

ALSO READ: Trump planning ‘largest mass deportation operation’ — on day one

The report pointed to a local advocacy group in the Rio Grand Valley that says the "wall" has taken away the residents' little green space. Michelle Serrano, who runs Voces Unidas RGV, noted that another problem is that the "wall" has made local flooding worse and terrified its large Latino community with around-the-clock surveillance.

“This is like a rights-free area,” she told The Independent. “We’re talking about an area where they freely racially profile us. It feels like a separate but equal situation.”

The Republican Party still has building the wall as a key piece of its platform, but the topic isn't surfacing amid discussions about immigration.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden pledged not to build any more of the wall, but the efforts on the border continued. A court then told the White House they must spend the money allocated in 2019-20 on building the wall. There was then a problem with environmental disasters that the Biden White House tried to side-step, only to be told by the courts that they had to do the environmental cleanup prior to building the wall.

Also Read: People expecting Trump voters to turn on him are fooling themselves

While Trump wasn't in the White House, GOP governors funded their projects to build Trump's promised wall. In Texas, that's 50 miles of state-funded wall.

"It’s an incredible amount of effort and spending for a piece of border policy that hasn’t been shown to make any meaningful difference in reducing migration overall," the report continued.

Trump's new plan is to orchestrate the deportation of 11 million documentary immigrants. The Trump team claims they'll start with criminals. Crossing the border illegally is a crime, however. So, Trump's team will be able to argue that anyone who crossed without claiming asylum or beginning the immigration process is technically a "criminal."

Given the mass deportations are part of his flagship 2024 campaign promise, Trump could request funding for that over the wall when making his pitch to Congress.

Read the full report here.

A proposed deregulation of the home loan market that Donald Trump is widely expected to pursue could have massive consequences for new homebuyers — particularly those with low incomes, reported CNN on Monday.

Specifically, Trump is likely to try to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage-backing giants that the federal government took a stake in following the 2008 financial crisis. He attempted to do this in his last term, but was unsuccessful.

Fannie and Freddie's function is to repackage existing mortgages to investors in order to ensure stable cash flow and allow loans to be issued affordably to people with lower incomes. They were brought under government conservatorship in order to stabilize the housing market during a period when the market had severely misjudged the risk of subprime loans.

The federal government's stake in these programs is worth billions of dollars, so re-privatizing them would be an immediate windfall — but it would also introduce significant new complexities into the mortgage market and, according to some economists, would result in homebuyers paying a lot more.

If the spinoff is not handled carefully, it could also scare off bondholders into seeing mortgages as riskier investments, driving up the price of 30-year fixed home loans for everyone.

ALSO READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

Mark Zandi, who heads up economic analysis at Moody's, "estimated that full privatization of Fannie and Freddie would cost the typical American taking out a new mortgage $1,200 annually." However, home prices and interest rates were lower back then — adjusted for today, it would be "between $1,800 and $2,800 per year for a typical mortgage holder, Zandi told CNN after updating his original paper’s calculations" — with the heaviest cost falling on people with lower incomes and credit scores.

Republicans have sought to privatize Fannie and Freddie for years, noting that the federal conservatorship was never intended to be permanent. They have also blamed these institutions, and their mandate of making home loans more accessible to lower-income people, for causing the 2008 financial crisis in the first place. This is not true, as Fannie and Freddie's share of the highest-risk category of mortgages actually decreased during the housing bubble.

Trump's re-election already injected new uncertainty into mortgage markets with, rates seeing a sharp uptick to 6.8 percent.

Solar panels and wind turbines give the world bountiful energy — but come with a conundrum. When it’s sunny and windy out, in many places these renewables produce more electricity than is actually needed at the time. Then when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing, those renewables provide little to no electricity when it’s sorely needed.

So for the grid of tomorrow to go 100 percent renewable, it needs to store a lot more energy. You’ve probably heard about giant lithium-ion batteries stockpiling that energy for later use. But when providing backup power, even a big battery bank will usually drain in four hours. The need for an alternative has the United States government, researchers, and startups scrambling to develop more “long-duration energy storage” that can provide a minimum of 10 hours of backup power — often by using reservoirs, caverns, and other parts of the landscape as batteries.

A new study from several universities and national labs in the United States and Canada shows that large-scale deployment of long-duration energy storage isn’t just feasible but essential for renewables to reach their full potential, and would even cut utility bills. It looked specifically at the Western Interconnection, a chunk of the grid that includes the western U.S. and Canada, plus a bit of northern Mexico. The study found that building more long-duration energy storage there would reduce electricity prices by more than 70 percent in times of high demand.

“It’s like an orchestra,” said Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics Laboratory at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor of the paper published last month in the journal Nature Communications. “We need to think about all these factors, how they work. But bringing in more storage can only help in making this more cost-effective.”

The technologies already exist to hold renewable energy for at least half a day, with more on the way. One technique is known as pumped storage hydropower: When the grid is humming with renewable power, a facility pumps water uphill into a reservoir. Then, when solar or wind power drops off, the facility lets the water loose to flow back down into another reservoir, turning turbines that produce electricity. It’s exploiting energy from the wind and the sun, along with the power of gravity.

“Battery storage on its own — or what people call short-duration energy storage — is very important,” said Martin Staadecker, an energy systems researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of the new study. “But you can’t just rely on lithium-ion batteries, because it would be very expensive to have enough to actually provide power for an entire week.”

As of 2022, the U.S. had 43 pumped storage hydropower facilities with a combined generation capacity of 22 gigawatts. (For perspective, the U.S. has around 150 gigawatts of wind power and 140 gigawatts of solar.) According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. has the potential to double its capacity for that kind of energy storage. In 2021, the Biden administration launched its Long Duration Storage Shot, part of the Energy Earthshots initiative, aiming to reduce the costs of the technology by 90 percent in a decade. And last year, it announced $325 million for 15 long-duration energy storage projects, including one that stores heat energy in concrete and others to make newfangled batteries made of iron, water, and air.

The researchers looked at long-duration energy storage without considering the particular technique involved, asking what would be the cheapest way to get the Western Interconnection to be 100 percent emissions-free. Their study found that long-duration energy storage would be particularly beneficial to a utility’s customers, reducing electricity costs in times of high demand on the grid, like in the late afternoon as people return home and switch on appliances at the same time that solar power on the grid is waning. More storage also means more backup power for ever-hotter heat waves, when whole regions flick on their AC units.

Companies are figuring out how to store energy underground, too. A company called Hydrostor, based in Toronto, Canada, uses excess renewable energy on the grid to pump compressed air into subterranean caverns filled with water. That forces the water aboveground into a reservoir. When the grid needs electricity, Hydrostor lets that water flow back into the chamber, pushing the air back to the surface to drive turbines. “We’re kind of creating a piston underground of water,” said Jon Norman, president of Hydrostor. “We’re actually building a cavity out using techniques that they use in the hydrocarbon storage industry to store propane and butane.”

If a region runs low on renewable power, like when the sun sets, it would have to import carbon-free electricity from elsewhere. But that requires transmission lines that cut through hundreds or thousands of miles of land, which are difficult to get approved and expensive to build. The new study found that it would cost between $83 billion and $130 billion to deploy the amount of long-duration energy storage in the modeling — depending on how the price of the technology declines as it matures.

With long-duration energy storage, utilities can deploy more solar panels and wind turbines locally and store up their energy, rather than having to ship it from somewhere else. Kevin Schneider, an electrical engineer who studies the grid at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory but wasn’t involved in the new research, said that could reduce the significant costs of building long-distance transmission lines. “Getting that flexibility in the system, where you can have a reservoir of electricity that you can store up and then release, that’s what allows us to not have to build as much infrastructure, and also be a little bit more resilient.”

The grid of tomorrow, then, may hum with renewable energy stored both in giant battery banks, but also stored in the landscape itself. Solar and wind power would be wasted no more.

Fox News hosts Lawrence Jones and Steve Doocy argued that President-elect Donald Trump would have pardoned Hunter Biden after President Joe Biden did the same thing.

While reporting on the pardon Monday, Fox News correspondent Madeleine Rivera noted that Republicans in Congress "have found no concrete evidence of wrongdoing by the Biden family."

Host Lawrence Jones asserted that the president did not need to pardon his son.

"You know, as I think the fear may have been misplaced, though, I think that the Democrats, including the president, Joe Biden, thought that Donald Trump would treat them like they treated him with political prosecution," Jones said. "I think they're wrong. I think Donald Trump would have pardoned Hunter Biden."

"I think we would have gotten some type of report about the corruption and what's been happening in Department of Justice," he continued. "I think he's going to clean house when it comes to the FBI and Department of Justice, but I don't think he would have went after Hunter Biden."

Doocy agreed that the incoming president "probably would have gone ahead and pardoned him."

ALSO READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

"The only difference is if Donald Trump would have pardoned Hunter Biden, you know, in 50-some-odd days, is it wouldn't be for that 10 year period," Doocy remarked. "It would just be for those two things that he's been convicted but not sentenced to a good point."

ALSO READ: Will Trump back the FBI’s battle against domestic extremists? He won’t say.

Trump has previously said that he was open to pardoning Hunter Biden. But on Sunday, he called the current president's use of the pardon power "an abuse and miscarriage of Justice."

Watch the video below from Fox News.

Have you ever noticed how a particular song can bring back a flood of memories? Maybe it’s the tune that was playing during your first dance, or the anthem of a memorable road trip.

People often think of these musical memories as fixed snapshots of the past. But recent research my team and I published suggests music may do more than just trigger memories – it might even change how you remember them.

I’m a psychology researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Along with my mentor Thackery Brown and University of Colorado Boulder music experts Sophia Mehdizadeh and Grace Leslie, our recently published research uncovered intriguing connections between music, emotion and memory. Specifically, listening to music can change how you feel about what you remember – potentially offering new ways to help people cope with difficult memories.

Music, stories and memory

When you listen to music, it’s not just your ears that are engaged. The areas of your brain responsible for emotion and memory also become active. The hippocampus, which is essential for storing and retrieving memories, works closely with the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center. This is partly why certain songs are not only memorable but also deeply emotional.

While music’s ability to evoke emotions and trigger memories is well known, we wondered whether it could also alter the emotional content of existing memories. Our hypothesis was rooted in the concept of memory reactivation – the idea that when you recall a memory, it becomes temporarily malleable, allowing new information to be incorporated.

Memories are malleable. Artur Debat/Moment Open via Getty Images

We developed a three-day experiment to test whether music played during recall might introduce new emotional elements into the original memory.

On the first day, participants memorized a series of short, emotionally neutral stories. The next day, they recalled these stories while listening to either positive music, negative music or silence. On the final day, we asked participants to recall the stories again, this time without any music. On the second day, we recorded their brain activity with fMRI scans, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow.

Our approach is analogous to how movie soundtracks can alter viewers’ perceptions of a scene, but in this case, we examined how music might change participants’ actual memories of an event.

The results were striking. When participants listened to emotionally charged music while recalling the neutral stories, they were more likely to incorporate new emotional elements into the story that matched the mood of the music. For example, neutral stories recalled with positive music in the background were later remembered as being more positive, even when the music was no longer playing.

Even more intriguing were the brain scans we took during the experiment. When participants recalled stories while listening to music, there was increased activity in the amygdala and hippocampus – areas crucial for emotional memory processing. This is why a song associated with a significant life event can feel so powerful – it activates both emotion- and memory-processing regions simultaneously.

We also saw evidence of strong communication between these emotional memory processing parts of the brain and the parts of the brain involved in visual sensory processing. This suggests music might infuse emotional details into memories while participants were visually imagining the stories.

Musical memories

Our results suggest that music acts as an emotional lure, becoming intertwined with memories and subtly altering their emotional tone. Memories may also be more flexible than previously thought and could be influenced by external auditory cues during recall.

While further research is needed, our findings have exciting implications for both everyday life and for medicine.

For people dealing with conditions such as depression or PTSD, where negative memories can be overwhelming, carefully chosen music might help reframe those memories in a more positive light and potentially reduce their negative emotional impact over time. It also opens new avenues for exploring music-based interventions in treatments for depression and other mental health conditions.

Music could help reframe negative memories into something less painful. Delmaine Donson/E+ via Getty Images

On a day-to-day level, our research highlights the potential power of the soundtrack people choose for their lives. Memories, much like your favorite songs, can be remixed and remastered by music. The music you listen to while reminiscing or even while going about your daily routines might be subtly shaping how you remember those experiences in the future.

The next time you put on a favorite playlist, consider how it might be coloring not just your current mood but also your future recollections as well.

Yiren Ren, Adjunct Researcher in Cognitive Brain Science, Georgia Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.