If only half of the stories they do weren’t about kissing Trump’s ass, it would be easier to take them seriously:
https://twitter.com/katierogers/status/1023585331369717760
Just in: Statement from NYT Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who says he told Trump his “language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.” pic.twitter.com/S6crsb2ID0
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) July 29, 2018
Oh, and this:
https://twitter.com/KaivanShroff/status/1023380808915025920
I spoke to the president over the last several days, and President Trump told me that if Iran does anything at all to the negative, they will pay a price like few countries have ever paid before.
— National security adviser John Bolton
Swamp Rabbit and I were watching Donald Trump and his henchmen on TV. I noted that John Bolton looks like God just appeared to him in a burning bush and scared him so bad his goofy mustache turned white. He’s one of those dangerously kooky neocons who, a few years ago, wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the White House. Now he’s a fixture there, echoing a dangerously kooky president who, arguably, would start a major war to take the country’s focus off the criminal investigation that will eventually, inevitably bring him down.
“Mueller might charge Trump, but that don’t mean he’s going down,” Swamp Rabbit said. “He’s the president. He’s got the Supremes and all them minions in Congress on his side.”
I told my friend that Trump and Bolton’s trash talk about Iran might come to nothing, just like his trash talk about North Korea. That Trump will be indicted if Mueller has the goods. That the law is on our side.
“Which law?” he said. “Most of them legal experts say there ain’t nothing in the Constitution that says a sitting president can be indicted. Nobody can tell the president what to do.”
The old rodent has a point. The language in the Constitution regarding presidential crimes is a bit vague. It says a president who has committed serious offense may be removed by Congress, but it does not say he can be criminally prosecuted while in office.
Few people in the news media are admitting this, but the apparent problem is that “the founders” simply couldn’t imagine an America that would elect a would-be dictator, or a Congress and courts system that would accept and support a would-be dictator’s misconduct, or a gaggle of presidential advisers who were nothing more than demented yes men.
I said, “You’re right, Trump would pull the trigger, or press the button, or whatever it takes to make the heat go away. But I’m hoping the general public will stop him before it comes to that.”
“Don’t count on it,” the rabbit replied. “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran is a pretty catchy song.”
People keep talking about newspapers as though they can’t stay in business, when what’s really happening is the venture capitalists are buying them and stripping them for parts. Via Deadspin:
When people talk pejoratively about “class warfare,” they almost never are referring to things like the above sequence of events. But what happened to the Daily News at the hands of Tronc is class fucking warfare, a massive redistribution of wealth from the paper’s working people to a disgusting handsy shitbag multimillionaire, in a decision made far above those working people’s heads by a small handful of executive- and investor-class vampires. The journalists who lost their livelihoods today in effect had their salaries and benefits re-routed to Michael Ferro’s bank accounts. Against their wills, they were made to pay him for being a fucking pig.
Versions of this are happening all across the media industry: Ownership parasites writing checks to themselves and each other that must be cashed out of the livelihoods of real people with no say in the matter. Deadspin’s parent company, Univision, recently bought out dozens of people across our network of sister sites—originally they’d intended layoffs, before negotiating with our union—not because we’re doing unprofitable work, but simply as a means of passing along the outrageous debt the company’s owners took on when they purchased Gizmodo Media Group in the first place. Next they’ll sell us off—altogether or piecemeal, as best suits their wallets and nothing else. It is, pretty much exactly, the Fuck you, pay me! sequence from Goodfellas, playing out in real time.
The Trump campaign really thought running for president was exactly like doing PR for a reality TV show. Amateurs!
Federal investigators looking into President Donald Trump‘s former lawyer Michael Cohen have been digging into payments made to women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump in the past. Now, it appears that American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer who made one of those payments, could be in trouble as well, according to The New York Times.
In 2016, A.M.I. paid former Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for her story about a relationship she said she had with Trump from 2006 to 2007. The deal gave A.M.I. the rights to the story, which they chose to sit on, effectively keeping the allegations under wraps. The deal also included an arrangement for McDougal to publish columns in A.M.I.’s publications, which she claims they did not fulfill.
Prosecutors are now looking at whether A.M.I.’s behavior crossed the line from journalism into political activity, given that they spent money on something that is believed to be for the benefit of Trump’s campaign. McDougal, in a lawsuit, claims that her attorney at the time, Keith Davidson, had been in touch with Cohen regarding the status of the agreement.
Fox accidentally invited an anti-ICE Democrat onto their show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=oKIWO7USvzY
“Wait, stop! This is the president’s ‘safe space’!”
Last week Swamp Rabbit and I watched House Republicans grill FBI agent Peter Strzok and wondered if they really believed Strzok was part of of an FBI conspiracy to link Donald Trump to Russian interference with the 2016 election, even though they knew the FBI had undermined Hillary Clinton’s chances, not Trump’s, by re-starting an “email probe” against Clinton right before the election.
And we realized the Republicans at the hearing, every one of them, were trying to make a case they knew was not only false but implausible, in the hope of somehow discrediting special council Robert Mueller if he releases evidence linking Trump to the Russians.
And we had to conclude that the TV hearing marked a new low point for the GOP, the point where they tacitly admitted they’d rather invent untruths and pursue false leads than publicly voice doubts about their dear leader, a dangerous fool who consistently sides with Vladimir Putin against the FBI and the Department of Justice.
And I remarked on the lies and cowardice of the Republicans, and on how none of Joe Stalin’s Soviet minions wanted to be the first to stop applauding when he made a speech, lest he or she be taken out and shot for lack of fervor.
“Hold on there, Odd Man,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Trump ain’t Stalin and the Republicans ain’t minions. Ain’t nobody gonna have them shot.”
I replied, “You’re right, Trump can’t have them shot. Not yet. But he can rile up his base and have his minions driven out of office if they take sides against him.”
Yesterday Trump and Putin met in Helsinki for a private love session then took questions from reporters. Trump expressed doubt about whether Russia was to blame for election interference, and he voiced confidence that the U.S. and Russia would get along better in the future.
After the meeting, some Republicans in Congress conceded the Russians really were to blame for election misconduct — hacking, etc. — but only those few who aren’t running for office again said anything overtly negative about Trump’s conduct. Certainly nothing approaching former CIA chief John Brennan’s charge that Trump’s performance at the Helsinki meeting was “nothing short of treasonous.”
I told Swamp Rabbit that Trump’s minions will continue to applaud him, no matter how rotten his actions, unless the tide turns and they think supporting him might hurt their chances for re-election.
“OK, but just don’t compare Trump to Stalin again,” Swamp Rabbit repeated. “He ain’t no killer dictator.”
“That’s an accident of time and geography,” I replied. “Lucky for his minions.”
So I was upstate again last weekend, speeding home from a sales job, when a road sign on the highway caught my eye: WHITE HAVEN 4 MILES.
“Perfect,” I said to Swamp Rabbit, my sales partner. “White Haven would be a good name for the whole county.”
We’d just worked a blues festival at which I spotted fewer than a dozen blacks in the audience of more than a thousand people. Hardly any blacks on stage, either. There’s nothing new about this, of course, but I couldn’t help but wonder aloud how a style of music so firmly rooted in black culture evolved into a genre whose fan base is overwhelmingly white.
“What exactly you askin’?” Swamp Rabbit said. “Of course the crowd is white. We’re in Pennsyltucky, not Philadelphia.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “The crowd would have been just as white if the show was in Philly.”
Swamp Rabbit groaned. “Culture is always changing, Odd Man. Most black people who liked the blues are dead now. Each new generation tries to make new sounds. Blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, funk, hip-hop. It was all black music at first but then it was white music, too. You got your BB King, you got your Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
I asked what he thought of the tendency of many white people to romanticize the black experience in the Jim Crow South. To appropriate black music, to commodify it. To turn black pain into product, as one blogger put it.
“Bullshit,” he said. “All music these days is product, in case you ain’t noticed. The money men ain’t looking for the next new thing. They’re looking to dig up the old thing and dress it up a little different.”
He mentioned a show we’d worked last week in some white suburb of Philly. The bands played a ghastly hybrid of Irish folk and punk rock at train-wreck volume as the crowd got drunk. It felt like someone was driving a nail through my forehead.
I reminded Swamp Rabbit that the “Irish” music I prefer is by people like Van Morrison and Rory Gallagher who grew up in Ireland playing African American music. I confessed to him that I still don’t understand why so many white people in Pennsyltucky — and in the Philly area, for that matter — embrace black music but avoid or are actively hostile to black people.
“Blah blah,” he said as we drove into the Lehigh Tunnel. “There’s a lot you don’t understand, Odd Man. Just be glad we ain’t gotta work no more of them Irish festivals this summer.”
I just want to point out that this is exactly how I operated as a journalist. It is why I am appalled at reporters who even believe they should register Independent so as to be above accusations of bias — or worse, DON’T VOTE.
I went up against politicians all the damn time. I did not take anything they said at face value, and researched what they told me. Surprise! They were lying.
This did not make me popular, either with co-workers or colleagues. Life was so much simpler when you served as a court stenographer.
But I was working class, and knew the stakes. I didn’t want to betray the readers who were looking for the truth. I didn’t.
A major part of the self-image of professional-managerial liberals is to imagine that they are value-neutral and ideally suited to arbitrate political conflict—a universal umpire. Most still haven’t realized that the game has changed and they are now the ones being played.
— Nikhil Pal Singh (@nikhil_palsingh) June 25, 2018
It is an ideological standpoint that thinks it is not, one that aligns strongly with, and will choose (especially when pushed): police over politics, civility over contention, norms over rights, security over freedom, order over equality, comfort over justice, right over left.
— Nikhil Pal Singh (@nikhil_palsingh) June 25, 2018
Case in point. pic.twitter.com/xWpuldgdiH
— Nikhil Pal Singh (@nikhil_palsingh) June 25, 2018
During the presidential campaign, National Enquirer executives sent digital copies of the tabloid’s articles and cover images related to Donald Trump and his political opponents to Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen in advance of publication, according to three people with knowledge of the matter — an unusual practice that speaks to the close relationship between Trump and David Pecker, chief executive of American Media Inc., the Enquirer’s parent company.
Although the company strongly denies ever sharing such material before publication, these three individuals say the sharing of material continued after Trump took office.
“Since Trump’s become president and even before, [Pecker] openly just has been willing to turn the magazine and the cover over to the Trump machine,” said one of the people with knowledge of the practice.
During the campaign, “if it was a story specifically about Trump, then it was sent over to Michael, and as long as there were no objections from him, the story could be published,” this person added.
