QOTD -- Bothsidesing Racism

 

"... Our elite political media is now bothsidesing racism.

"Most of the coverage of Thursday’s Supreme Court decision -– to the extent that it raised the issue of racial animus at all -- consisted of, literally, both sides. Reporters briefly quoted Alito’s opinion, briefly quoted Justice Elana Kagan’s blistering dissent, and left it at that. Jump ball.

"See the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and NBC Nightly News coverage, for instance. The CBS Evening News and ABC World News Tonight whiffed entirely on the racial element.

"That was bad enough.

"What was even worse was the New York Times 'news analysis' headlined 'Justices Clash on Whether Race Played a Role in Trump’s Bid to Deport Haitians.' In it, chief legal affairs correspondent Adam Liptak explicitly treated Trump’s obvious racism as an open question, with two sides.  [snip]

"If you’re going to write about politics and racism, one of the most important stories to tell is that not just Trump, but the entire Republican Party – inspired and liberated by Trump -- is becoming more and more overtly racist. And that includes the Republicans on the high court.

"As I wrote in October, “It’s becoming increasingly clear that white supremacy is one of the core animating principles of the Republicans who control all three branches of government.” -- Dan Froomkin, at his "Critical Read" Substack, on the recent racist Republican SCOTUS's deportation decision in Mullin v. Doe.  

We've been doing this blogging stuff for over two decades, and one thread stands out as much as anything else in our political culture:  the news media will never speak honestly and with clarity about anything that puts the Republican Party in a bad light without trying to create a false comparison with Democrats.  Never.  "Working the refs" only works for Republicans, largely because Democrats aren't effective doing it, or don't do it at all.  But, to look for a moral spine in the broad news media is to go on a fool's errand.  They're corporate, bean-counting, access-driven cowards.

 

Lost Causes

 

Oliver Willis, having witnessed the latest example of the corporate media rolling over for fascists in the form of Lesley Stahl's tongue- bath of Rep. Marjorie "Traitor" Greene on last Sunday's 60 Minutes, is convinced there's no hope in expecting that media to change.  Instead, he offers two responses for progressives:

Stop holding fire on the media. Criticizing the press isn’t the same as Donald Trump declaring them the “enemy of the people.” Press criticism is a long-held American tradition and while it is unlikely to produce real change in the underlying dynamic, it at least educates others about the media that is being consumed. Most politically active Americans are terrible at media literacy and don’t understand that a lot of this coverage is bad. They wrongly view the press as neutral and give the people pushing Greene and Trump and the rest too much of a benefit of a doubt.

Promote progressive media and progressive breakthroughs in the mainstream media. Liberals don’t need the equivalent of Fox News, digital cults devoted to worshipping Republican politicians. But there isn’t anything wrong with a fact-based news outlet with a progressive point of view (and yes, I work for one). Similarly, it is worth it to reward progressive breakthroughs within the mainstream media with attention, showing political leaders that their messages can work while showing mainstream media gatekeepers that it isn’t only right-wing coded stories that can add to their bottom lines (the only thing they really care about)...

We would only clarify that Democratic elected leaders at all levels need to be much more aggressive in calling out Republican- friendly media malpractice.  There are worse things than not being invited back on a program or to a reception -- like losing your democracy.  They should take a cue from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who knows how to deliver an appropriate, timely punch.  

The corporate media is not going to challenge the burgeoning fascism being offered by the Republican/ Seditionist Party;  we know that from the last 8 years, and that the only thing that matters is getting eyeballs on the product and money in the bank (and Fox "News" isn't alone -- see Moonves, Les).  They're going to give the fascists as much print and air time as they need as long as the profits go up. 

We don't usually quote Lenin here, but what he purportedly wrote rings true, to the effect that capitalists will sell you the rope to hang them with.  Problem with that today is that all our heads, and democracy's, would be in the noose.

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer discusses the recent Nobel Peace Prize given to Filipino journalist Maria Ressa and Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, as both a warning and a "do better" for American journalists:

It’s fitting that — thanks to Friday’s Nobel Peace Prize — world history will likely cherish Ressa, Muratov, and their brand of death-defying journalism far longer than it will remember the totems of modern U.S. media like recently retired Washington Post editor Marty Baron — whose uninspiring response to the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump was, famously that “we’re not at war … we’re at work” — or the New York Times’ Dean Baquet, who doesn’t see journalism as activism but something he blandly calls “sophisticated true objectivity.”

Huh? [snip]

For all the Beltway journalists so eager to restore a breathless access journalism and the most cynical, “savvy” form of politics-as-a-game news coverage, the embrace by both the Nobel committee and the wider world of the more daring vision of journalism as a chief weapon in the war against rising neo-fascism — the stance so boldly adopted by Ressa and Muratov — ought to serve as a wake-up call. [snip]

The future of American democracy depends, frankly, on whether journalists stop burying their head in “the work” of balanced-but-misleading reporting and admit that, yes, actually, we are at war. We need to glom onto Maria Ressa’s vision — that when the truth is under attack, truth-telling is not a clinical science. Journalism is activism.

Sadly, due to the existential need to get clicks, ad dollars and subscriptions, we don't see the basic business model of American journalism changing, with the occasional exception for an investigative piece that makes a splash but is soon forgotten.  How far from their examples our "journalists" are.  

Speaking of American "journalism," Fox "News" recently celebrated its 25th anniversary.  Washington Post media critic Eric Wemple takes a few well- deserved swipes at the one institution news sewer that can claim responsibility for the poisonous, divisive, downward- spiraling state of American politics today:

If nothing else, Fox News had a talent for self-promotion, even before there was anything to promote.

“Fox News Channel to stress fairness” read the headline on the July 1996 story the Houston Chronicle published in the run-up to the Oct. 7, 1996, launch of Fox News, under the management of network chief Roger Ailes and News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch.

It’s not too late for a retraction, Houston Chronicle!  [snip]

... It’s one thing to corral a constituency; it’s quite another to poison that constituency. We won’t belabor the extensive and atrocious misadventures of Fox News, which this blog and many, many other sources have highlighted to our mutual exhaustion. There’s enough to fill a mammoth website.

For the sake of brevity, we’ll just highlight a development that so happens to coincide with the big 25th anniversary: The ongoing lawsuits against Fox News by voting-tech firms Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems. Both of these companies claim they were the subject of false coverage in the aftermath of November’s presidential election, and both sued the network for the efforts of key hosts — Sean Hannity, Maria Bartiromo, Jeanine Pirro and Lou Dobbs (who no longer has a show on Fox Business Network) are among the offenders — to associate their work with election-rigging. [snip]

It’s a machine, in other words — promoting lies, and then reporting their traction as national news. That’s what Fox News has done with the vocal plurality of Americans in its corner, 25 years running.

Their business model is stoking white grievance, racial hate, fear, all in service to their cult leader in his on- going coup.

On that on- going coup, laying the foundation for the next coup -- voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, allowing legislatures to overturn election results, etc. -- requires the willingness of elected Republican "leaders" to maintain the Big Lie.  Rep. Steve Scalise (Coup- LA) at your service:

The House’s second-ranking Republican, Rep. Steve Scalise, repeatedly refused to say on Sunday that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, standing by Donald Trump’s lie that Democrat Joe Biden won the White House because of mass voter fraud.

More than 11 months after Americans picked their president and almost nine months since Biden was inaugurated, Scalise was unwilling during a national television interview to acknowledge the legitimacy of the vote, instead sticking to his belief that the election results should not have been certified by Congress.

“I’ve been very clear from the beginning,” he said. “If you look at a number of states, they didn’t follow their state-passed laws that govern the election for president. That is what the United States Constitution says. They don’t say the states determine what the rules are. They say the state legislatures determine the rules,” the Louisiana congressman said on “Fox News Sunday.” 

These are human weasels (no offense to weasels).  In Scalise's case, his description of himself as KKK leader "David Duke without the baggage" tells you exactly who he is.

This is the sub- moronic cult leader they're so desperate to re- install in the White House:

A new book reports that former President Donald Trump asked his top intelligence official to investigate an absurd conspiracy theory that Chinese thermostats changed votes in the 2020 election.

In an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released Betrayal by ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, which was shared on Sunday’s edition of This Week, the former president was said to be “intrigued” by the theory – which was presented to him by Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who Trump wanted to install as acting attorney general.

“[Clark] believed that wireless thermostats made in China for Google by a company called Nest Labs might have been used to manipulate voting machines in Georgia,” Karl wrote. “The idea was nuts, but it intrigued Trump, who asked Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to look into it.”

Some tinfoil hats should take care of it!  Also, Jeffrey Clark, the skunk willing to subvert the Department of Justice to cast doubt on the validity of the 2020 election, appears to be as nuts as his cult leader.

Lastly, for the best collection of links to posts from around the Internet, please visit Infidel 753's link round- up, which appears to get more comprehensive every week.  Keep it coming; we can handle it!.

Media Desperate To Give Trump Credit For Vaccine Rollout

 

The "mainstream media" is back to its old tricks, having learned nothing from 4 years of dystopia ending in a botched coup attempt:

With the COVID-19 vaccines starting to bring the pandemic to an end, former President Trump has stepped in to take credit for the feat. 

What’s surprising is that he’s been aided in this by the Washington Post and New York Times, both of which have run articles this week arguing that the speed-up in the vaccine rollout under President Biden only builds off of a plan put into place by Trump. In short, they contend that Trump is right: he had a plan to distribute the vaccine that Biden was lucky enough to inherit.  

That’s flat wrong. A look at what actually happened in the Trump administration’s last months shows that the White House lacked a plan for the “last mile” of distribution, leaving that to the states while lobbying Congress not to pass much-needed funding that would spur state and local governments to get the vaccine into arms. 

On its own terms, the Trump administration did not have a plan to distribute the vaccine to Americans en masse beyond “let the states figure it out.”  (our emphasis)

Here's NBC's Peter Alexander whining that President Biden didn't give credit to the former guy, basically providing laudatory words to put in the President's mouth:

 

 

For his tone deaf, ahistorical kumbaya efforts, Alexander gets rightfully dunked:

 

In the long history of dumb media dynamics, “why won’t Biden give more credit to the bleach drinking insurrectionist for his management of the pandemic that killed 500k people” may be the dumbest to date https://t.co/4Tdh7rYQKf

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) March 12, 2021

 

Then, we have the media "factcheckers":

 

Which doesn't sound like much of a plan---> https://t.co/mwocfi63de

— Ann Telnaes (@AnnTelnaes) March 12, 2021

There's more that could be dug up, but we're tired and it would just be redundant.

We expect (and are seeing) this revisionist history from the likes of Fox "News" and the various frothing right- wing Trumpist outlets.  But when "mainstream media" seems to be taking its cues from them, it's deeply disheartening to say the least.  The vaccine rollout has been botched in many states, thanks to the Trump "plan" noted above -- "let the states figure it out."   It's causing delays and potentially unnecessary death. That's not cause for praise.

But at least it's a pause in their whining about Biden not holding a press conference yet.

Quote Of The Day -- The Non-Reckoning

"The question of how to scrutinize presidential candidates who aren’t congenitally dishonest, corrupt, or incompetent—when their opponent is Donald Trump—has been vexing journalists since before the 2016 election. Back then, their refusal to faithfully convey the differences between the candidates on matters of basic fitness for office handed Trump the presidency, and ignited widespread calls for the industry to reckon with its failures.

"Three years later, a reckoning has not happened, and in its absence, Trump has set about trying to recreate conditions under which the press will hound his 2020 opponent about a small number of trivial sins while his ubiquitous, mortal ones dissipate into the background."  Brian Beutler, on how "The 2016 Emails Nightmare Is About To Repeat Itself." We've said this many times before, but corporate journalism is as amoral as the existential threat in the Oval Office, and shares at least one basic characteristic:  it's all about the money.

How The Media Midwifed The Birth Of The Trump Myth

Now that we've seen the numbers behind the fraudulent business "success" of incompetent Donald "Not Exonerated" Trump, Karen Tumulty goes into the wayback machine to see how the myth of Trump as a golden boy was nurtured and promoted by the media early in his wealth- destroying career:

In the 1980s and 1990s, the media conspired to perpetrate a vast fraud on the American people. So-called journalists and their complicit editors colluded — yes, that’s the word — to convince an unwitting public that Trump was a spectacularly successful businessman.

The scale of the ink-fueled myth has been exposed at last, thanks to 10 years’ worth of his tax information obtained by the New York Times, which revealed Trump’s enterprises were flopping on an epic scale. [snip]

You wouldn’t have known any of that from a December 1987 People magazine cover that featured the 41-year-old tuxedoed “tycoon” under a headline pronouncing him “TOO DARN RICH.”

“Almost everything he touches turns to profit,” the magazine marveled, adding: “He says he’s too busy to run for President right now, but in a few years, well, who knows?” [snip]

“He is the man with the Midas fist,” Newsweek wrote a few months before the People cover.

The Times wrote the earliest classic of the genre with its first profile of Trump back in 1976. The story by society reporter Judy Klemesrud began: “He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford. He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth ‘more than $200 million.’ ”  (our emphasis)

The years- long run of Trump's "The Apprentice" on NBC is not mentioned, although it's arguably the most egregious example of the media lionizing this hyena and playing a large role in creating the Trump myth.  This and uncritical reporting for the last 30 years has culminated in the disaster we see today.  Tumulty is just scratching the surface, of course;  but the examples cross from entertainment media to "news" outlets, who were all too happy to buy into Trump's flimflam.

Tumulty concludes,

During the final debate of the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed to “run our country the way I’ve run my company.” As we are learning, that is one campaign promise he’s on track to keep.

One might also observe, as we are learning, too much of today's media is on track to commit the same malpractice -- this time in reporting how Trump's running the country.

Media Equivocations Cosset Trump, Constitution Edition

The underlying story is awful enough (please read), but look how the Washington Post characterizes it:

President Trump suggested Wednesday that he would ask the Supreme Court to intervene if Democrats move to impeach him — a notion that legal experts said showed a misunderstanding of the Constitution.  [Ed.:  "legal experts"? We only play legal experts on this blog, but we don't think you need to be a "legal expert" to call absolute bullshit on that "notion".]

It was unclear how Trump would legally justify such a move, since the Constitution delegates impeachment proceedings to Congress, not the courts. [Ed.:  No shit, Sherlock.] Trump mentioned the idea briefly in morning tweets in which he lashed out at Democrats who are continuing to investigate him following the release of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report.  (our emphasis)

Would it be so difficult (albeit truthful) to say that, as usual, the dolt- in- chief doesn't know what he's talking about?  That it's another example of his willingness to trample on the Constitution and it's system of checks and balances?

These are the "Democracy Dies In Darkness" people, fergawdsakes.

Alas, the cosseting of this incompetent moron continues unabated in the media.

BONUS: Check out some of the reactions to the moron's tweet.

Times And Post Finally Get The Mueller Report (Mostly) Right

Two of the biggest media offenders following the release of consigliere William "Low" Barr's 4- page coverup letter were the Washington Post and the New York Times, whose headlines and reporting conflated Barr's dishonest presentation as "the Mueller report."  Now that the actual, full (still redacted) Mueller report is out and the extent to which Barr covered for his unfit boss is apparent, they had a chance to get it mostly right for a change:






The Post also has a separate section providing key parts of the Mueller report, annotated.

Small steps...

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

Jon Chait on Friday's New York Times report that the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation on Putin puppet Donald "Rump" Trump early in his regime, and specifically what Special Counsel Mueller has been investigating:

... An agent is not the same thing as an asset. An asset can describe a wide range of relationships, but in Trump’s case, it would mean that he is subject to sexual or financial blackmail, along with possibly some form of back-channel propaganda. We know for a fact that Trump is vulnerable to sexual blackmail, but that kind of leverage, if it exists, would be difficult for Mueller to obtain. (Sexual blackmail is only useful if you keep it locked up tightly.) It’s far more likely that Trump’s financial vulnerability opened him up to Russian leverage. And that is the kind of information American investigators can access. [snip] 

The Times report tells us that collusion is only part of the story. The relationship between Trump and Putin did not merely rest on their mutual interest in the Trump campaign defeating Clinton, but indicates some deeper connection. From the very beginning of this story, pundits have underestimated the full extent of Trump’s ties to Russia and how much deeper the story might yet go. Now we already know Mueller is not merely looking into crimes, but trying to ascertain the foundational loyalties of the President of the United States.  (our emphasis)

It should be carved in stone by now: Follow the money.

We flag this problem often, and E.J. Dionne, Jr., writes about the media's obligation to our democracy not to repeat its grievous errors from 2016:

... When reason is in retreat and when candidates are given strong incentives to stir up ugly passions, we have a problem. 

This is where we are now, and President Trump is both the product of this crisis and its apotheosis. He brought home just how nonsensical and dishonest our politics have become with his assertion on Thursday about Mexico paying for his border wall: “Obviously, I never said this, and I never meant they’re going to write out a check.” 

This was shocking, even from an unrepentant liar. Trump denied ever saying something that, as David Nakamura reported in The Post, he did say “at least 212 times during his campaign and dozens more since he took office.” 

This points to the media’s major shortcoming in 2016: its continuing commitment to “both sides are equally flawed” journalism, which led to its failure to portray Trump as the moral aberration he is...

Unfortunately the media, as an institution, bends toward superficiality and moral neutrality when it comes to politics (as opposed to the "look at people doing good things" fluff that takes up so much time in print and broadcast media). Here's one discouraging, but entirely predictable, example.

A chilling reminder that there's more than one nut in the White House:

President Trump’s National Security Council asked the Pentagon in September for military options against Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. 

The request was made shortly after an attack near the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, which the White House blamed on Iranian proxies in Iraq. 

The request from the National Security Council troubled many at the Pentagon and State Department, especially given that the attack caused no casualties and little damage. 

“It definitely rattled people,” one former senior U.S. administration official told the Journal. “People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.” 

Months later, it remains unclear whether the proposed military actions were provided to President Donald Trump, and even whether he knew that the request was made.

The shaky hand of National Security Advisor and neocon wild man John "Snowball" Bolton is at play here.  This is looking more and more like their "wag the dog" option for distracting from Rump's ballooning problems.

Finally, please do yourselves a favor and check out Infidel 753's link round- up.  It's a great way to start the week.

Just The Facts, Ma'am

We've become so accustomed to seeing news reports on deranged demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump tiptoe around what is plain for the eye to see (that he's, well, a deranged demagogue), that when we see a reporter speak the unvarnished truth, it comes as a small shock.  We're not referring to cable news reporters or to articles marked "analysis," but to a news story on the front page of our hometown paper, the Washington Post.

Here's how their White House Bureau Chief, Phillip Rucker, opens his news report in today's paper:

For two years, they tried to tutor and confine him. They taught him history, explained nuances and gamed out reverberations. They urged careful deliberation, counseled restraint and prepared talking points to try to sell mainstream actions to a restive conservative base hungry for disruption. But in the end, they failed. 

For President Trump, the era of containment is over. 

One by one, the seasoned advisers seen as bulwarks against Trump’s most reckless impulses have been cast aside or, as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis did Thursday, resigned in an extraordinary act of protest. What Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) once dubbed an “adult day care center” has gone out of business. 

Trump will enter his third year as president unbound — at war with his perceived enemies, determined to follow through on the hard-line promises of his insurgent campaign and fearful of any cleavage in his political coalition. 

So far, the result has been disarray. The federal government is shut down. Stock markets are in free fall. Foreign allies are voicing alarm. Hostile powers such as Russia are cheering. And Republican lawmakers once afraid of crossing this president are now openly critical.

At the same time refreshing and trite, what Rucker expresses is what's been in plain view for any but the most determined Trump cultists to see since Dolt 45 descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower.  It's not labeled "analysis" or couched in "some say" or "on the other hand" or other journalistic fig leafs, but in the facts of Trump's puerility, his impulsive recklessness, and the disarray of his shambolic regime.  Rucker later goes on to quote the pithy remark made by Gen. Barry McCaffrey, "This is a rogue presidency," something that was evident from Day 1 with Dolt 45's "American carnage" inaugural and crowd mirage.

Why has it taken so long to get to the point where journalists (or at least this one) finally report facts that have been obvious for ever?  Was it the unprecedented confluence of events of the last week, especially the Mattis resignation, that convinced some that it was time to report the truth in no uncertain terms?  Maybe, but at the same time, as the great Jay Rosen points out, others =cough= New York Times =cough= are still in the maintain access/ both sides/ don't rock the boat mode, even after the Mattis debacle:

Almost feels like one of the audiences for the Mattis letter is both sides journalists who now cannot ignore that someone on the President's team is saying what they are persuaded of and yet reluctant to say themselves. He's not just "unpredictable," but reckless and incompetent. https://t.co/xkLBuLwudZ

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 21, 2018

So, we won't pop the champagne corks just yet. One giant leap for a man, one small step for journalism.

QOTD -- Let Them Eat At Trump Grill

The wonderful Michelle Goldberg, yesterday in The New York Times:

...The civility police might point out that many conservatives hated Obama just as much, but that only demonstrates the limits of content-neutral analysis. The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories. [snip] 

... [T]here’s an abusive sort of victim-blaming in demanding that progressives single-handedly uphold civility, lest the right become even more uncivil in response. As long as our rulers wage war on cosmopolitan culture, they shouldn’t feel entitled to its fruits. If they don’t want to hear from the angry citizens they’re supposed to serve, let them eat at Trump Grill.

Enough about "civility;"  now we need to continue to focus on those issues and actions that make progressives want to be heard.

What Matters

In the short attention span of our celebrity- fixated culture, it was not at all surprising what dominated the news in the past 72 hours (spoiler alert:  it was not the New England Journal of Medicine's report on the actual likely Hurricane Maria death toll in Puerto Rico):

To the extent that a death toll serves as a rough measure of the severity of a natural disaster, we learned on Tuesday that a part of the United States experienced a disaster that was as much as 70 times more severe than had been reported—or understood by most Americans. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz made a vital point when she said Tuesday, “These deaths and the negligence that contributed to them cannot be forgotten. This was, and continues to be, a violation of our human rights.” 

Yet, according to Media Matters, the nation’s cable networks had trouble focusing on the staggering news about Puerto Rico because they were all wrapped up with Roseanne. “Cable news covered Roseanne for over 10 hours. They covered Hurricane Maria’s death toll in Puerto Rico for just over 30 minutes,” explained a review by the group, which noted that Fox News devoted a mere 48 seconds to the news from Puerto Rico. (our emphasis)

Four thousand six hundred and forty-five fellow Americans perished from September 20 through December 31, 2017, as a result of Hurricane Maria (a "conservative" number according to the report's authors).  That compares with 1,833 who perished in Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

It's not just Puerto Rico that's suffered terribly and has been largely ignored. Never forget your fellow Americans of the Virgin Islands, who absorbed Hurricane Irma just before Hurricane Maria hit:

With its health care system crippled, the Virgin Islands government and federal relief agencies decided to move patients, and Correa was flown to nearby Puerto Rico. Less than two weeks later, with Hurricane Maria approaching, some of the medical evacuees were moved again, this time to the mainland.  

In total, more than 1,000 medical evacuees have been sent off the Virgin Islands, including critically ill patients, dialysis patients, people in nursing homes, and their caregivers, Davis says. The National Disaster Medical System, a federally coordinated partnership between the Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Defense, and Veterans Affairs, helped cover the cost of care and housing for 803 of the evacuees. The costs for the other 200 individuals has been picked up by the government, private insurance, or other sources, Davis says, and medical evacuations are still ongoing. 

The majority of medical evacuees were sent to Atlanta, with some elsewhere on the mainland or in Puerto Rico. Nine months after Hurricane Irma, the whereabouts of many medical evacuees are unknown. And the Virgin Islands, still struggling to rebuild in the aftermath of the hurricanes, can’t accommodate all of those who want to come back home. (our emphasis)

If we had a competent administration, and if we had a media that could compartmentalize the celebrity outrage- of- the- day as well as the shiny objects the Very Stable Genius and his co- conspirators strew around them every day, perhaps more attention could be brought to bear on the human disaster that's still afflicting our fellow Americans, and with that attention, focused action. It's too late for many of our fellow citizens, but the desperation of many thousands of others remains.

That's what matters.

BONUS:  More here and here.

Washington Post Pulls No Punches In Reporting On Trump's Dreamer Sabotage

This is how journalism is supposed to work: tell the truth about what you see.

On the front page of The Washington Post today, there's no "both sides" CYA in this lead news story by reporters David Nakamura and Mike DeBonis:

Trump administration assault on bipartisan immigration plan ensured its demise

As much of the country was gripped Wednesday by horrific images from the mass shooting at a Florida high school, two dozen senior Trump administration officials worked frantically into the night to thwart what they considered a different national security threat. 

The looming danger on the minds of the officials was a piece of legislation scheduled for a vote the next day in the Senate. It was designed to spare hundreds of thousands of young immigrants known as “dreamers” from deportation — but to the men and women huddled in a makeshift war room in a Department of Homeland Security facility, the measure would blow open U.S. borders to lawless intruders. 

“We’re going to bury it,” one senior administration official told a reporter about 10:30  that evening. 

The assault was relentless — a flurry of attacks on the bill from DHS officials and the Justice Department, and a veto threat from the White House — and hours later, the measure died on the Senate floor. 

The Trump administration’s extraordinary 11th-hour strategy to sabotage the bill showed how, after weeks of intense bipartisan negotiations on Capitol Hill, it was the White House that emerged as a key obstacle preventing a deal to help the dreamers.

Bravo, and thank you!  This has to continue because there are so many lies and so much disinformation pouring out of the Trump/ Republican firehose of falsehood, that we need a continual, factual pushback and record. Here, those facts point to a vile White (Supremacist) House that's determined to resist any attempt to provide a humane solution for Dreamers, as part of their overall campaign to "Make America Great White Again."  Now (very belatedly) perhaps we're seeing an emerging sense that journalists bear a great responsibility in our system for telling the truth and holding people and institutions accountable.  Perhaps.

Morning Reading

Just how abnormal is neo- fascist narcissist Donald "Rump" Trump (a.k.a., Lord Dampnut)? Our morning reading plumbs the shallows for answers.

Big ego + weak mind = disaster:

Before Donald Trump proposed a 1,000-mile wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to stop migrants, he tried to build a two-mile barrier on a pristine stretch of Irish coast to rein in an ocean. 

He didn’t succeed.  

Irish surfers, weekend beachcombers, environmental scientists, local planners and even a microscopic snail got in his way. In December, Trump International Golf Links backed down from plans it had said were essential to protect the company’s lone Irish course — picturesquely nestled in dunes overlooking the Atlantic — from being swallowed by rising seas. 

For a man who loves to win, the defeat — just a month after his election as president — has left a bitter taste. And despite the motley nature of the resistance, Trump seems to have singled out a lone culprit: the European Union, whose rules and regulations underpinned many of the objections. 

In interviews and public statements, Trump has cited his tangle over the golf-course wall as Exhibit A in justifying a jaundiced view of the E.U. that puts him at odds with decades of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy. (our emphasis)

OK, we'll go there:  this is just par for the course for Narcissistic Personality Disorder sufferer Rump.

That chortling you hear is Russian autocrat and Rump puppet master Vladimir "Vlad the Invader" Putin seeing his dream of a shattered democratic Europe coming closer to fruition thanks to a certain mentally disturbed shitgibbon.

Then there's this fallout from Melissa McCarthy's epic portrayal of Rump's mini- Goebbels, "Baghdad Sean" Spicer:

As the press secretary for a president who's obsessed with how things play on cable TV, Sean Spicer’s real audience during his daily televised press briefings has always been an audience of one. 

And the devastating “Saturday Night Live” caricature of Spicer that aired over the weekend — in which a belligerent Spicer was spoofed by a gum-chomping, super soaker-wielding Melissa McCarthy in drag — did not go over well internally at a White House in which looks matter. 

More than being lampooned as a press secretary who makes up facts, it was Spicer’s portrayal by a woman that was most problematic in the president’s eyes, according to sources close to him. And the unflattering send-up by a female comedian was not considered helpful for Spicer’s longevity in the grueling, high-profile job in which he has struggled to strike the right balance between representing an administration that considers the media the "opposition party," and developing a functional relationship with the press.

"Trump doesn't like his people to look weak," added a top Trump donor. (our emphasis)

Précis: weak- minded, would- be strongman doesn't like his people to look weak.  Look for Baghdad Sean to appear with an assault rifle and in camo at his next press briefing.

Is they learning? Maybe when it comes to the Washington Post national news staff:

President Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to preemptively shift blame for any future terrorist attack on U.S. soil from his administration to the federal judiciary, as well as to the media. [snip] 

Trump’s terrorism blame-game is in keeping with how he ran his campaign, looking for scapegoats at nearly every turn. He often blamed his own failings — a poor debate performance or a gaffe or a primary loss — on the media or other perceived enemies, and he fed his own conspiracies that his adversaries were out to undermine him. [snip] 

In the days since [U.S. District Judge James] Robart’s ruling last Friday night, Trump sent nine tweets about the judge and stoking fear that suddenly the door had been opened for terrorists to enter the country and cause “death & destruction.” [snip] 

In his commentary, Trump has ignored the screening measures and other counterterrorism precautions that have long been in place by U.S. customs and border officials. [snip] 

Trump also sought to diminish the credibility of Robart, calling him a “so-called judge.” Although presidents at times critique judicial rulings, they rarely take personal swipes at individual members of the federal bench. Trump’s breach of protocol could have a chilling affect on the judiciary, which constitutionally rules independently of the executive branch.  (our emphasis)

Less than 3 weeks in, Rump's anti- democratic, un- Constitutional, intemperate words and actions are alarming even those with a long history of normalizing this existential danger.  It's come too late to avoid having his tiny fingers near the nuclear launch codes and on filling the Supreme Court vacancy, but it's important that every opportunity for push back (a.k.a, "telling the truth") is taken by the media.  The Stormtrumpers want to operate in a chaotic blizzard of "alternative facts," the better to foster a disintegration of the norms, boundaries and truths that keep our civic institutions functioning.  Media like the Washington Post (which did it's large part in promoting the Clinton e-mail nothingburger) are perhaps beginning to realize the danger we're facing due to their malpractice and are attempting a late course correction.  To which we say, "Welcome to the real world -- better late than never (?)."

Morning Reading

A few things to look at this morning. As always, please check out the entire articles at the links (our emphasis throughout).

Catherine Rampell on neo- fascist incompetent Donald "Rump" Trump's "management" style:

If this is what “running government like a business” looks like, it’s no wonder President Trump’s companies kept going bankrupt. 

One week into the presidency, we’ve gotten a taste of Trump’s management style. And so far it’s been plagued by many of the bad habits common to poorly run businesses.  

From what we had years to observe, Rump was a con artist, a fraud, an incompetent, and a world- class narcissist.  That he would be a teetotal disaster bringing those "skills" and temperament to the presidency was not lost on a majority of the voters. (And the incompetence trickles down, as they say.)

Adam Gopnik on why George Orwell would recognize Rump's America, with Rump's "voter fraud" witch snipe hunt as an example:

... Watch: there will be a “commission” consisting of experts borrowed from Breitbart; it will hold no hearings, or hold absurdly closed ones; or hold ones with testimony from frequent callers to “The Alex Jones Show”—and this clownish commission will then baldly conclude that there is, indeed, widespread evidence of voter fraud. And Trump will reassert the lie and point to his commission’s findings as his evidence. 

Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress, thoroughly intimidated, fear shining from one eye and cupidity from the other, will exploit the “question” of voter fraud to pursue policies of actually suppressing minority voters. 

Speaking of Congressional Republicans, Infidel asks of those who are whispering about Rump's unbalanced behavior:

My question to those "Republican officials" who are now suddenly so alarmed, though, is this -- have you been living in a cave for the last year and a half?  Trump didn't suddenly start behaving like this six days ago.  Throughout the whole primary and general-election campaign, he displayed the mental stability of a foul-mouthed, bad-tempered toddler.  Why didn't you stop him?  The Republican establishment's anti-Trump efforts are already going down in history as the epitome of fecklessness and cowardice.  "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," with H-bombs on standby yet, and now all of a sudden you've noticed that this guy is too unstable and impulsive to occupy the position you helped him get "elected" to?

Opinion writers and us bloggers are one thing. But reporters at the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle are possibly joining us in the reality- based world (several months too late), if you can judge by how their ledes are, for now, being written. Here's today's example.

Ashley Parker and Sean Sullivan have a "reality check" for Rump:

Many of the sweeping actions President Trump vowed this week through his executive orders and proclamations are unlikely to happen, either because they are impractical, opposed by Congress and members of his Cabinet, or full of legal holes. 

The reality — that yawning gap between what Trump says he will do and what he actually can do — underscores his chaotic start, which includes executive actions drafted by close aides rather than experts and without input from the agencies tasked with implementing them.

We'll be keeping an eye on the new articles and media reports to see how well and how long they keep pointing to Emperor Rump's lack of clothes and his catastrophic Russo- Republican administration.

The Banality Of Evil Strikes Again

They lie just as easily and naturally as they breathe.

On their first full day in office, neo- fascist pathological liar Donald "Rump" Trump and his mini- Goebbels, empty suit Press Secretary Sean "Baghdad Sean" Spicer, faced the public and media in their official capacities and... lied their asses off.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump’s first full day in office, he gave a speech at CIA headquarters in which he lied about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and falsely claimed that he had never feuded with the U.S. intelligence community. Hours later, his press secretary emerged from the West Wing, lied about the size of the inaugural crowd and took no questions. 

The most important news here is not the crowd size, or whether Trump feuded with America’s spies (he did), or even that the president and his press secretary lied. Politicians lie. What’s remarkable is that the president and his administration chose to lie, repeatedly, on their first full day on the job, about a relatively trivial ― and easily checkable ― matter.  (our emphasis)

The article details the facts opposing Rump and his mini- Goebbels.  The truth is plain to see (as they say). That Rump lies as a matter of course is not in the least surprising;  he's a narcissist and sociopath. Clearly, he's selected a staff that is willing to lie just as vigorously and nonsensically just to keep their jobs. That this is the template right from the start, while not surprising, may be disturbing enough to have awakened some of the stenographers in the media, long oblivious to what was coming their way.

In the meantime, here's "Vladimir Putin's" (Beck Bennett's) message to the American people on Rump, crowds and the Women's March yesterday:



BONUS:  SNL's host Aziz Ansari (first south Asian host ever) closed his monologue with this:

"If you're scared about Trump and you're very worried, you're going to be OK, too. Because if you look at our history, change doesn't come from presidents. Change comes from large groups of angry people. And if day one is any indication, you are part of the largest group of angry people I have ever seen.”

"A Message To My Doomed Colleagues" From A Russian Journalist

In light of the latest spectacle of media/ Donald "Rump" Trump interactions (see post below), there's an interesting open letter to U.S. journalists by Russian journalist Alexey Kovalev in Medium.com (h/t Raw Story).  Kovalev makes the following main points, where he draws parallels from his experience with Russian autocrat Vladimir "Vlad the Invader" Putin to the emerging American autocrat Rump, and offers his condolences for what the American press is going to experience. Here are excerpts:

"Welcome to the era of bullshit.

Facts don’t matter. You can’t hurt this man with facts or reason. He’ll always outmaneuver you. He’ll always wriggle out of whatever carefully crafted verbal trap you lay for him. Whatever he says, you won’t be able to challenge him...

Don’t expect any camaraderie.

These people are not your partners or brothers in arms. They are your rivals in a fiercely competitive, crashing market and right now the only currency in this market is whatever that man on the stage says. Whoever is lucky to ask a question and be the first to transmit the answer to the outside world wins. Don’t expect any solidarity or support from them...

Expect a lot of sycophancy and softballs from your “colleagues”

...There will be people from publications that exist for no other reason than heaping fawning praise on him and attacking his enemies. But there will also be one token critic who will be allowed to ask a “sharp” question, only to be drowned in a copious amount of bullshit, and the man on the stage will always be the winner (“See? I respect the media and free speech”)...

You’re always losing.

This man owns you. He understands perfectly well that he is the news. You can’t ignore him. You’re always playing by his rules — which he can change at any time without any notice..."

There's much more to the letter, so please check it out at the link.

Looking to the corporate media for consistent, effective push- back against this looming "era of bullshit" is a fool's errand. (See above.) There may be a few dogged souls with a conscience and the courage to speak the truth, but for the vast majority it will be normalize, normalize, normalize. We've already started to see it, and the shitgibbon isn't even sworn in yet.

Morning Reading - The Media And Trump

Two interesting reads this morning on the role of the media ("mainstream" and right-wing) in the rise of neo- fascist demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump.

Catherine Rampell says the only antidote to Trumpism in the Republican Party is to "dismantle" the right- wing media machine.

The sickness in today’s Republican Party is not confined to its current standard-bearer. It is therefore not curable by merely disavowing, however belatedly, the soon-to-be-defeated nominee. The sickness has taken over the Republican base, and there’s only one antidote.  

If Republicans truly want to save the Republican Party, they need to go to war with right-wing media. That is, they need to dismantle the media machine persuading their base to believe completely bonkers, bigoted garbage. 

It is, after all, the right-wing radio, TV and Internet fever swamps that have gotten them into this mess, that have led to massive misinformation, disinformation and cynicism among Republican voters. And draining those fever swamps is the only way to get them out of it. [snip]

In other words, Trump is not some black swan, whose unique cocktail of charisma, telegenicism and political fluidity landed him the nomination. His nomination is the product of years of race-baiting, conspiracy-theorizing, expert-delegitimizing right-wing media nonsense, which Republican politicians aided and abetted because it seemed politically expedient at the time. They helped the alt-right create the alternate reality that made a Trump nomination inevitable. 

And unless the party establishment grapples with its own complicity in misinforming, misleading and frightening the masses, it’s doomed to field more Donald Trumps in the future.  (our emphasis)

Somehow, we don't see the party establishment going to war with the likes of Fox "News," Drudge and Breitbart.  If nothing else, this election has proven how absolutely craven that "establishment" is in not wanting to offend its Stormtrumper base that lives and breathes in the right- wing media bubble, a monster it's created and encouraged for 40 years or more.  It would also require some level of honesty and introspection, traits we don't associate with today's Republican Party. So, not likely.

Focusing on the "mainstream media," Dana Milbank calls out the "lap dogs" of "horserace journalism" (which we've come to associate most closely with his friend and colleague Chris "Lizard" Cillizza, by the way), and goes after one particularly rotten apple:

“Morning Joe” has come in for a large share of criticism for cheering on the rise of Trump. And contributor [Mark] Halperin’s praise for Trump’s tactical genius has been particularly soulless. 

In March, Halperin declared on “Morning Joe” that Trump is “one of the two most talented presidential candidates any of us have covered.” In January, also on “Morning Joe,” he said Trump’s attacks on the Clintons were “politically brilliant.” 

In June on his Bloomberg TV show, “With All Due Respect,” Halperin asserted that “it’s not racial” for Trump to attempt to disqualify an Indiana-born federal judge as a “Mexican” because of his ancestry. His reason: “Mexico isn’t a race.” 

When Trump named Stephen Bannon to head his campaign, coverage noted the publisher’s strong ties to the racist alt-right. Halperin argued that Bannon “should not have let himself be so defined by others. The guy’s got an impressive résumé.” 

Earlier this month, when a New York Times lawyer responded to Trump’s threat to sue the newspaper, Halperin said the lawyer’s letter was a “big mistake” because “we have to be fair and even in this campaign and not basically take sides.” 

And when Trump was widely panned for calling on Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails, Halperin said, “There is a lot of fault on both sides.”

Halperin has long been viewed by progressives as a soulless and hardly neutral observer of politics (see here, here, and here just for the un- appetizer). It's good to see he's finally being called out on the pages of the Washington Post. Milbank goes on to explain why the attempt by many in the media to be neutral only served to "legitimatize the illegitimate."

But Halperin (and, Dana, feel free to call out your colleague Lizard in the future) is one rotten apple in a barrel of rotten apples that populate the cable channels, op/ ed pages, and internet. Once this election is over, the stain on their reputations that we would see as indelible may fade quickly as diversionary scapegoats (Rump as black swan event, as Rampell puts it), and the necessity for our political and its handmaiden media culture to "heal," push the question of culpability for Rump into the background.  We'll end up with the same cast of loathsome characters after as we had before, both in the media and the Republican Party, because it'll continue to work for them.

The Apocalypse Nears: Normalizing Trump Continues

Brian Beutler has a good read on the media's still- not- too- late obligation to bear witness faithfully to the abnormality of neo- fascist demagogue Donald "Rump" Trump.  Here's a snippet:

Whether you have a short or long view, you’ve seen enough to say authoritatively that Trump is different from all major party nominees in living memory. It is not normal in modern times for a major party nominee to be an erratic, racist demagogue; and it is almost definitionally abnormal for a major party nominee to be described as such by leading members of his own party. [snip] 

For several weeks now—including since Labor Day, when most Americans truly began paying attention to the campaigns—these truths, which we all took for granted six months ago, have not been communicated to glancing news consumers. They’ve receded from most article leads, headlines, front pages, and A-block TV segments. 

That development is the product of many collective choices and thousands of individual ones. It is an institutional failure, and as such, a major and abrupt course correction seems highly unlikely. But that doesn’t absolve reporters, editors, producers or anyone else who is part of the system. There’s still time to alter our focus, however incrementally, so that it better captures what’s new and alarming, and all journalists have some degree of power to nudge it in that direction. The goal is not to swing an election, or call Trump mean names, or render partisan judgment about whether electing him would be a world-historical mistake. It’s simply so that after this is all over, however it shakes out, we can say we bore witness faithfully.  (our emphasis)

Time is short, and the impulse to normalize this "world historical mistake" either by commission or omission continues apace in political reporting, McNews stories, and in a boot- licking corner of the entertainment world (or perhaps we should say, "hair tousling corner").

It's worth repeating what Charles Pierce said a few days ago:

... For the balance of this election cycle, and largely due to the presence in it of this ridiculous man and his ridiculous campaign, the American people have proven themselves profoundly unworthy of being called citizens.

And that goes double for those who know better and yet stand by and say or do nothing.

BONUS:  Regarding that cringe- worthy effort by Jimmy Fallon (WTF is wrong with you?)  to normalize (humanize?) Rump linked to above, this is our favorite tweet so far on the episode:

Somewhere in Trump tower:
"Make the call." pic.twitter.com/RRNIIhCaas

— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) September 16, 2016

Sunday Cartoon Twofer - Leave The GOP Alone!

(click on image to enlarge)

(Darrin Bell, via gocomics.com)

(Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

It remains to be seen whether Republicans will get away with their "don't ask us tough questions, it hurts our fee-fees" strategy following their "debate" whine fest this past Wednesday.  That will depend on whether the media feels it has to play along or not.  (We're not sold on the idea of a corporate media that's going to stand up to the crybabies.)  In the meantime, here's a meme we can't resist adding to the pile:

(KnowYourMeme.com)