Oliver Willis. Remember him? Remember Daily Kos! I did a search and clicked on my favorite headline.

My search was barack obama with kamala harris today and elon musk with trump.

I wanted something to link to for a post about how both presidential candidates are suddenly appearing with their most prominent supporter. Today's a big day and their pulling out their biggest... celebrity.

Here's the headline at Daily Kos that made me laugh: "Obama hits the trail for Harris as Trump teams up with notorious troll."

Obama’s first event for Harris will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Thursday....

Why is he only appearing now? My hypothesis would be that it was thought that he would overshadow Harris, but now there's a new desperation. Something is needed. Will Obama say we should elect her as a way to have continuity with the Obama Administration? But she's said many times "We're not going back." You're supposed to understand that we're not going back to the Trump Administration, but lately it seems to have meant we're not going back to the Biden Administration, which seems incoherent, give that her performance as Vice President is her primary credential. But how can we believe we could go back — without going back — to the Obama Administration? Oh! It's easy, with Obama speaking. He can make these ideas fit together, with his fine rhetoric and mellifluous voice.

Back to Willis:

On the same day Obama’s plans were revealed, Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk announced that he will attend Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. Musk is worth an estimated $261 billion, and has a history of anti-union views.... On social media, Musk has frequently promoted conspiracy theories and racist memes in support of Trump and other conservative causes. The social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which Musk owns, has seen a resurgence of pro-Nazi accounts since Musk took over the business.

That's the view from Daily Kos. 

I'll watch both rallies. I'm interested in seeing how the 2 great men share the stage with their presidential candidate, and I'll judge them by what they do today. 

Police arrest CNN reporters in Minneapolis, but strings are pulled, so apparently they're okay.

Live video on CNN shows CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez and crew being arrested by police in Minneapolis.

CNN anchor says that the crew is being told that they were being arrested because they were told to move and didn't. https://t.co/OCXikYLU42

— Breaking News (@BreakingNews) May 29, 2020

And then...

cnn reporting that cnn head jeff zucker spoke to gov tim walz and he apologized. ok but here's the thing -- we can't all have the head of cnn call the governor on our behalf, can we?

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) May 29, 2020

What Rush Limbaugh is almost surely planning to say to those who are outraged at his rape analogy.

Rush Limbaugh likes to throw out things that he knows liberal media types will propagate. He knows what gets them, and he's using them to go viral. It doesn't always work out right for him, and the Sandra Fluke incident ended up hurting him, but often it creates excitement around his show and keeps his reputation relatively fresh. People love him and hate him, and that's keeps the old radio show going.

This weekend lots of the sort of people who love to hate him are raging about the analogy he used in talking about the ending of the Senate filibuster:

Let’s say, let’s take 10 people, in a room in a group. And the room is made up of six men and four women, okay? The group has a rule, that the men cannot rape the women. The group also has a rule that says any rule that will be changed must require six votes of the ten to change the rule.

Every now and then some lunatic in the group proposes to change the rule to allow women to be raped. But they never were able to get six votes for it. There were always the four women voting against it, they always found two guys, well the guy that kept proposing that women be raped kinda got tired of it. He was in the majority and he said, you know what, we’re going to change the rule. Now all we need is five."

And the women said, "You can't do that."

"Yes, we are. We're the majority, we're changing the rule." Then they vote. Can the women be raped? Well, all it would take then is half the room. You could change the rule to say three. You could change the rule say three people want it, it's gonna happen. There's no rule.

We've got Carolyn Bankoff in New York Magazine ("a vile, profoundly inappropriate rape analogy"), Amanda Marcotte ("The rape comparison is distasteful and casually misogynist"), and Politico collects the tweets:

Ana Marie Cox, a political columnist for the Guardian US, wrote that “Limbaugh using a rape analogy to explain the filibuster really takes mansplaining to a level I never imagined” — or as ChartGirl.com founder Hilary Sargent dubbed it, “rape-splaining.” Media Matters research fellow Oliver Willis tweeted that “rush limbaugh really games out how you could theoretically vote to rape women. hes just throwing it out there folks,” while fellow Media Matters colleague Todd Gregory called it “dumb, glib bullshit” that “is such a perfect encapsulation of rape culture, it should be put in a museum.” And The Huffington Post’s Elise Foley and Sabrina Siddiqui also weighed in, with Foley tweeting “Class act, that guy” in response to Siddiqui’s comment, “In today’s edition of offensive rape analogy.”

Come on. It's a trap. Don't you know your most basic famous aphorisms about democracy? "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." Usually attributed, probably incorrectly, to Benjamin Franklin, it vividly drives home the problem with simple majority rule.

I'm virtually 100% certain that on his Monday show, Rush Limbaugh will laugh at his critics for their ignorance of the famous aphorism. He can easily point out that he did not minimize the seriousness of rape. In the aphorism, the lamb is killed by the wolves. His analogy substitutes rape for killing, men for wolves, and women for the lamb. Really, it's men who are getting the negative stereotype, so misogyny is exactly the wrong word. A lamb is the very symbol of innocence. And it is killed by those terrible, selfish wolves. Knowing Rush, I predict he'll pivot to a discussion of abortion: Maybe women don't realize that killing an innocent is terrible. Maybe that's why they didn't understand the workings of his analogy.

Oliver Willis, at Media Matters, writes a shamefully dishonest post about me.

Just posted today:

To listen to the conservative media, the Daily Caller has exposed the discussion listserv Journolist as some sort of hotbed of liberal message coordination. Ann Althouse said it "was designed -- apparently -- to figure out how to structure the various news stories to serve the interests of their party," Limbaugh said the emails showed "mainstream coordination with the left," and Beck saw a plot "to help Barack Obama."

This theory of secret list coordinating all manner of nefarious activities gets debunked, however, by the latest Journolist story from the Daily Caller...

The Limbaugh and Beck quotes are supported by links (to Media Matters posts with video), but there's no link for what I said. Why's that? I don't think it's mere sloppiness, because, in fact, he's quoting something I wrote on June 27th, before the Journolist archive became available. I said:

Remember the liberal meme that George Bush was "incurious"? But aren't these liberal journalists incurious? They had this email list that was designed — apparently — to figure out how to structure the various news stories to serve the interests of their party. The Journolist was a self-herding device. They wanted to be good cogs in a machine that would generate power for the Democratic Party, didn't they? For career and social rewards? That's my hypothesis. As an intellectual, I would like to study how that worked. I'll write a book about it if someone will send me the raw material I need — the complete archive of the Journolist. 

I'm hoping to see the archive, because I can test a theory about what was going on. I'm asking questions and using the word "apparently." I don't know the truth. I want to read. Yet Willis presents my quote as if I am already reading, as if I'm misrepresenting what has been published in The Daily Caller. In fact, I've been notably critical of the way The Daily Caller has presented quotes from the list.

Willis writes: "To listen to the conservative media, the Daily Caller has exposed the discussion listserv Journolist as some sort of hotbed of liberal message coordination." My quote couldn't form the basis for an opinion about what the Daily Caller had exposed. It was written before The Daily Caller had published anything from the archive!

Media Matters... indeed...

ADDED: Having written this post and thereby worked through my anger, I must concede to some amusement at the presentation of "the conservative media" as me, Limbaugh, and Beck — in that order!