Showing posts with label Trump Stenography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Trump Stenography. Show all posts

National Press Largely Fails to Cover Pro-Immigrant Protests

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, July 16, 2019
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[Content Note: Nativism.]

Earlier this month, I noted the lack of national coverage of protests around the U.S. against the Trump Regime's immigration horrors. There were lots of local news stories, but a dearth of coverage in national media outlets, including cable news.

I noted at the time: "The next time you see someone snorting about how people in the U.S. aren't 'out in the streets,' tell them that people are out in the streets. The more urgent question is why our national press doesn't cover it."

Last weekend, Lights for Liberty organized more than 700 events and/or vigils across the nation, often in coalition with local organizers like Pennsylvania's Shut Down Berks Coalition or national groups like Never Again Action, in protest of Donald Trump's vile nativist agenda.

More than 700 protests.

And virtually all of the news coverage is, once again, local media. The biggest story I could find was this item in USA Today, which was still just a piece on the local D.C. vigil, mentioning only in passing that it was part of nationwide protests numbering in the hundreds.

Today, Never Again Action is "shutting down every entry point to the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that is responsible for this terror against the immigrant community."


This should be front-page news. It should be leading the headlines on cable networks. Instead, I only know about it at all because I'm on Twitter and have friends on Twitter who are following these actions, too.

Maybe you are only hearing about it here for the first time. That shouldn't be the case.

There are people around this country who are writing who are tweeting who are chanting who are marching in solidarity with migrants and refugees being detained in deplorable conditions at facilities at the southern border and elsewhere; who are resisting this regime's heinous nativist policies of purposeful malice. And the political press is virtually silent.

We are meant instead to be debating whether Donald Trump is really a racist.

There could be no more insulting obfuscation and distraction as people demand justice and relief from his white supremacist agenda.

Look for stories in your local news. Share them. Raise awareness of this resistance. Find ways to participate, if you are able and feel safe doing so.

If the national press won't make any noise, then we must.

Open Wide...
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The Trump Revisionism Begins

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Thursday, July 11, 2019
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It was always only a matter of time before the revisionism about how Donald Trump won the 2016 election began in order to try to confer legitimacy on Trump's utterly illegitimate presidency, and to mask the fact that Trump was an inevitability behind which the Republican Party was eager to consolidate their power.

We are not meant to remember that Trump was elected only with significant assistance from foreign election interference, widespread GOP voter suppression efforts, possible voting machine hacking, the racist antiquity known as the Electoral College, and a political press that has hated Hillary Clinton for decades and dedicated more airtime to empty podiums awaiting Trump's arrival than serious discussions of urgent issues like climate change or the erosion of abortion access.

Instead, we are meant to understand that Trump was a unprecedentedly strong candidate, an anomaly of GOP politics who won over the conservative elite despite their distaste for him.

It's an argument designed to work two ways: Either Trump survives in 2020, and thus he is a legend who remade the Republican Party and won over his detractors; or Trump fails in 2020, and thus he was just an outlier and the Republicans who are hesitatingly claiming they objected to his Trumpness will be back in charge where they should be.

There's a forthcoming book trying to make this case. [Content Note: Sexual assault] Its rewriting of history is extraordinary.

Of course it needs to be. The history is not easily forgotten.

There are various Republican reprobates key to Trump's rise who were interviewed for the book, and naturally they used the opportunity to try to rehabilitate their own images, as well. It's all part of the Trump Revisionism.

I'm particularly disgusted by Paul Ryan, that craven shitwheel, pretending to be some kind of hero by saying now that Trump isn't fit for the presidency.


Anyway. Keep your eyes peeled for more evidence of Trump Revisionism. It's going to come fast and furious ahead of 2020. It's gaslighting on an epic scale, and, when you feel like you're being thrown off a spinning carousel by the bullshit you're reading that isn't remotely real, know you will not be alone.

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Putin Weighs in on Iran

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Thursday, June 20, 2019
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Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a highly theatrical Q&A today, during which he said the following about the possibility of a U.S.-Iran war: "We don't want this. ...It would be a catastrophe for the region, because it would lead to a spike in violence and a number of refugees from the region."

Well. That certainly explains why Donald Trump has cooled to the idea of war with Iran, despite Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton banging the drums.

Hours later, during a joint press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump said of Iran shooting down a U.S. drone: "I think probably Iran made a mistake. I would imagine it was a general or somebody that made a mistake in shooting that drone down. ...I have a feeling that it was a mistake made by somebody that shouldn't have been doing what they did. I think they made a mistake. ...I find it hard to believe it was intentional, if you want to know the truth. I think that it could have been somebody who was loose and stupid that did it. We'll be able to report back, and you'll understand exactly what happened. But it was a very foolish move. That I can tell you."

Sure. And you know how famously forgiving Trump is of people who make mistakes.

(At the same press conference, Trudeau trolled Trump by coughing, a clear reference to Trump kicking White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney out of the Oval Office when he coughed during an interview.)

So, the collusion continues to happen right out in the open.

And, just to be clear: I don't believe that Putin is legitimately advocating against a war that would destabilize a region he has been actively trying to destabilize to create opportunities for him and his oligarch cronies to exploit.

I do believe he wants this to be his — and Trump's — public position, at least for the time being. For whatever reason.

It would be great if the media would report anything Putin says about foreign policy with the disclaimer that Putin often says one thing publicly and is orchestrating something to the absolute contrary in secret.

The public should know that they can never take what Putin says at face value.

After all, this is the same person who has repeatedly claimed that the Kremlin did not interfere in the 2016 presidential election. And we all know that is a goddamned lie.

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We Resist: Day 834

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, May 03, 2019
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a black bar with the word RESIST in white text

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

* * *

Late yesterday and earlier today by me: This Is Extremely Bad News and Primarily Speaking.

Here are some more things in the news today...

Eric Beech and David Alexander at Reuters: Trump Says He's Not Inclined to Let Former Counsel McGahn Testify to Congress. "Donald Trump said on Thursday he did not believe he would allow former White House counsel Don McGahn to testify to committees in Congress, saying McGahn had already spoken to the special counsel on the Russia probe. ...'I've had him testifying already for 30 hours,' Trump said, referring to McGahn's testimony to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team. Trump said allowing McGahn to testify would open the gates for others to be called."

This is just the President of the United States openly admitting that he is obstructing justice, and no one who objects can do a fucking thing about it, because his party retains the majority in the Senate and is eager to abet his authoritarianism.

House Democrats are doing (mostly) what they can, but they can't really do anything of consequence without Senate support.

Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb at CNN: Nadler Threatens to Hold Barr in Contempt If DOJ Doesn't Comply with New Democratic Offer on Mueller Report. "Nadler sent Barr a new letter proposing that the committee could work with the Justice Department to prioritize which investigative materials it turns over to Congress, specifically citing witness interviews and the contemporaneous notes provided by witnesses that were cited in the special counsel Robert Mueller's report. ...Nadler set a deadline of 9 a.m. ET Monday for Barr to respond and said he would move to contempt proceedings if the attorney general does not comply."

Great. Except what's doing to happen when Barr doesn't comply? Nothing. And Barr knows it and Trump knows it and we all know it.

Which is why Democrats should quit faffing around and just go straight to impeachment at this point. Calling for Barr's resignation (for example) is a waste of time. He's not going to resign. Impeach him. Let's go.

In other Barr news... Mark Joseph Stern at Slate: William Barr's Justice Department Just Filed the Most Nakedly Political Brief in the Agency's History. "On Wednesday afternoon, after Attorney General William Barr finished his truculent and mendacious testimony before the Senate, the Department of Justice filed perhaps the most embarrassing, illogical, and nakedly political brief in the history of the agency. With Barr's assent, the DOJ argued that the entire Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional because Congress zeroed out the individual mandate's penalty in 2017."


Paul Waldman at the Washington Post: Trump Is Already Set to Use the Government to Destroy the Democratic Nominee.
The 2020 election is going to be ugly in many different ways. If you thought Donald Trump ran a rancid campaign when he was trying to make it to the White House, just you wait until he's fighting to preserve his power. It has been obvious for some time that [Donald] Trump is planning to promote hatred and division, but one thing we haven't yet focused on is how he will use the resources of the federal government to make sure he wins reelection.

...[D]o you think Trump would hesitate for an instant before telling Barr to open an investigation of the Democratic nominee for president? And given everything we've seen from Barr, do you think he’d refuse that order?

Trump may already be preparing to mobilize the federal government's resources to destroy his opponent, whoever that turns out to be. The New York Times has a new piece featuring what is sometimes called an oppo drop: a news story about a politician initiated by a political rival passing damaging information to reporters. It happens all the time, and it's not necessarily illegitimate as journalism, because the information itself may be relevant and the journalist does his or her own investigation to verify what they've been told.

But in this case, the Times acknowledges the story's provenance right in the headline: "Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies."

...[W]hat we have here is the president's lawyer, with the direct involvement of the president himself, pushing a foreign official to open an investigation for the obvious purpose of embarrassing a potential rival, while the president is pushing the Justice Department to act in ways that could harm that rival as well.

That should be a scandal in and of itself. And I can't say this strongly enough: This is only the beginning.
Absolutely correct. And of course much of the political press is going to assist Trump in leveraging the power of the U.S. federal government to destroy his opponent(s), under the auspices of "campaign coverage," without clear indication of the role they are playing in undermining the integrity of both U.S. elections and the very U.S. government itself.

On that note... Matt Gertz and Rob Savillo at Media Matters: Study: Major Media Outlets' Twitter Accounts Amplify False Trump Claims on Average 19 Times a Day. "Major media outlets failed to rebut [Donald] Trump's misinformation 65% of the time in their tweets about his false or misleading comments, according to a Media Matters review. That means the outlets amplified Trump's misinformation more than 400 times over the three-week period of the study — a rate of 19 per day. The data shows that news outlets are still failing to grapple with a major problem that media critics highlighted during the Trump transition: When journalists apply their traditional method of crafting headlines, tweets, and other social media posts to Trump, they end up passively spreading misinformation by uncritically repeating his falsehoods."

* * *

[Content Note: Christian Supremacy] At Rewire.News, Jessica Mason Pieklo has more on the new HHS rule (about which I wrote yesterday): Trump Administration Finalizes Health-Care Discrimination Rule. "Louise Melling, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement, 'Once again, this Administration shows itself to be determined to use religious liberty to harm communities it deems less worthy of equal treatment under the law. This rule threatens to prevent people from accessing critical medical care and may endanger people's lives. Religious liberty is a fundamental right, but it doesn't include the right to discriminate or harm others.'"

[CN: Nativism; death]


[CN: Nativism]

Immigration lawyer Lily S. Axelrod has an important Twitter thread on an appalling decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals:


[CN: Climate change] Jonathan Watts at the Guardian: Biodiversity Crisis Is About to Put Humanity at Risk.
The world's leading scientists will warn the planet's life-support systems are approaching a danger zone for humanity when they release the results of the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken.

Up to one million species are at risk of annihilation, many within decades, according to a leaked draft of the global assessment report, which has been compiled over three years by the UN's leading research body on nature.

The 1,800-page study will show people living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects, and other creatures on which humanity depends for food, pollination, clean water, and a stable climate.

The final wording of the summary for policymakers is being finalised in Paris by a gathering of experts and government representatives before the launch on Monday, but the overall message is already clear, according to Robert Watson, the chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

"There is no question we are losing biodiversity at a truly unsustainable rate that will affect human wellbeing both for current and future generations," he said. "We are in trouble if we don't act, but there are a range of actions that can be taken to protect nature and meet human goals for health and development."
Grim.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?

Open Wide...
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The Political Press Vows to Be Hot Garbage in 2020

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Wednesday, February 20, 2019
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The political press has never done any kind of meaningful reflecting on their magnificent failures during the 2016 election. That's not to say they didn't learn any lessons, though. They just learned the wrong ones. Like: Being wildly irresponsible makes us lots of money.

And so they are fixing to replicate, and double down on, the failures that cost us so much during the last presidential election.

To wit, Maxwell Tani at the Daily Beast: CNN Defends Hiring Former GOP Operative Sarah Isgur as Political Editor.

CNN is standing by its decision to hire a former Department of Justice spokesperson and political operative with no journalistic experience to help lead its 2020 political coverage.

On Tuesday, Politico first reported that Sarah Isgur was joining the network as a politics editor, sparking fierce backlash from many who said she was unqualified and not suited for the job.

In a note to the network's politics team Wednesday, several top politics editors said that although they were upset that the news leaked out before it could be announced internally, the company was "thrilled" that Isgur was joining next month, saying she "brings a wealth of government, political, communications, and legal experience to our team."

The note, signed by Washington Bureau Chief Sam Feist, Newsgathering Vice President Virginia Mosley, and Political Director David Chalian, clarified Isgur's new role, saying she would spend the first few months "getting to know our systems and our people," and eventually would "play a coordinating role in our daily political coverage — helping to organize and communicate between newsgathering, digital, and television."

"With more than two dozen candidates to cover, constant coordination is needed more than ever," it said.
Never mind that "Can Isgur even effectively coordinate?!" wasn't at the center of anyone's criticisms. Who gives a single fuck if she can coordinate like the wind. The problem is that she is a former Republican political operative with zero evident qualifications for the position.

Democrats are already at a disadvantage, media-wise, and not just because the political press skews heavily white, male, and conservative: They're running against an incumbent president, who will exclusively suck up all the attention for the Republican field, while multiple Democrats divide press attention on the opposing side.

(And the bigger that Democratic field gets, the tinier sliver of attention each candidate will be obliged to fight for.)

That CNN is now appointing a Republican operative to coordinate coverage of an election that mightily favors the Republican candidate is a big problem for Democrats. And anyone else who values trying to protect the shredded vestiges of our democracy.

CNN learned entirely the wrong lesson from 2016. And Donald Trump's takeaway is that the more he bullies and attacks news outlets, the more willing they will be to pander to him and his party. Terrific.

Open Wide...
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Democrats Will Present Rebuttal to Trump Tonight

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, January 08, 2019
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The bad news: All the major networks have committed to allowing Donald Trump free airtime tonight to disgorge his obscene lies about immigrants and the imagined danger they pose at the southern border.

The good news: The Democrats have demanded equal time to deliver a rebuttal, and, so far, "CBS, NBC, and CNN have said they will carry the response."

The Democrats haven't yet announced who will deliver the rebuttal. My fervent wish is that it's Senator Mazie Hirono.

No matter who does it, though, it's going to be impossible for them to get as much traction as the president, whose lies will be broadcast and re-broadcast and repeated in headlines and dissected by cable news panels for days on end.

Which is why the networks should never have granted him this time in the first place, knowing that he would use it just to promulgate a hateful agenda designed to engender manufactured fear and violent prejudice. They are assisting him with his campaign of stochastic terrorism, allowing themselves to be enlisted as conspirators in his war on immigrants.

And there is precedent — very recent and relevant precedent — for turning down a president who requests airtime: In 2014, President Barack Obama requested airtime for a speech on immigration and was turned down by every network.

But the rules were always different for Obama — and the rules are different for Trump. This is, after all, the candidate whose empty podium got $billions of free airtime during the election. (And gets it still.)

There are people calling for a boycott of Trump's address this evening. I understand that. The thing is, because Trump has now been granted the highly visible platform he was seeking, he's more likely to use it to maximum effect. With Trump, there's always a chance he's going to scream at everyone to look at him only to waste our time, but, given the current environment, his announcing a national emergency is a significant possibility. And boycotting the speech isn't going to change that.

So, don't watch it if you don't want to watch it. Watch it if you want to, without feeling shamed by people making a different choice. Whatever feels best to you. Life is short.

Open Wide...
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Trump Cancels White House Holiday Party for Press

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Thursday, December 13, 2018
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Grumpy Trumpy isn't in the holiday spirit: "Donald Trump has become the president who stole Christmas after canceling the annual festive party for the White House press. The decades-old tradition would see reporters and the president put aside their differences for one night for a lavish party that would see spouses and family invited to drink and be merry. ...One of the main events of the parties was picture-taking sessions in which the president and first lady would pose with guests in front of a Christmas tree, with the White House sending out the photos."

Last year, Trump begrudgingly held the party, but refused to pose for any pictures. This year, according to a Fox News report, it's canceled altogether.

To be frank, the White House holiday party for the press is one of a number of examples of the problematic coziness of the Beltway press with the politicians they are meant to be holding accountable. Pix with the prez at Crimbo is access journalism at its worst.

The president shouldn't even have the need to cancel the party, because journalists should be boycotting any social engagements with a regime that is waging war on the free press, undermining trust in public institutions, and inventing their own "alternative facts" to foment informational chaos.

However, irrespective of the fact that this event should never have existed in the first place and should find no self-respecting journalist wanting to attend anyway, the fact that Donald Trump is simply canceling it is evidence of his escalating hostility toward the free press, and that is deeply troubling.

He does not want to be held accountable, and he cannot bear to mingle with the people tasked with doing it. Further, he wants them to feel unwelcome, and that is nothing a president should ever be communicating to the press — nor to the public about the press.

This is the behavior of authoritarians, and it should not be dismissed with the increasingly common shrug because "that's just Trump."

I certainly hope this latest insult to the press will finally be the thing that makes them reconsider just how chummy they want to be with the Trump Regime.

But it probably won't.

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Mike Pence Is a Scoundrel Who Won't Go Quietly

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, November 16, 2018
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One of Donald Trump's most loyal stenographers, the New York Times' Maggie Haberman, has put this shit into the world on behalf of the president: [Content Note: Video may autoplay at link] "Is Mike Pence Loyal? Trump Is Asking, Despite His Recent Endorsement."

One. No. Mike Pence is not loyal.

Two. If Trump imagines that publicly questioning Pence's loyalty is going to make him more loyal, he doesn't understand his veep at all. This passive-aggressive shit categorically is not going to make Pence more loyal, because Pence has never been loyal. (And never will be.) Positioning himself proximate to Trump's power isn't loyalty. His objective is to seize that power for himself, as soon as possible.

Three. I suspect Trump will swiftly discover all of the above once arrives the day in January marking the halfway point of his term, at which time Pence can assume the presidency and still be eligible to serve two full terms as president himself.

I have long said that I believe Pence has been working with the FBI since the campaign and with Mueller since he started his investigation, and I believe it still. And, as I have said many times, to really understand Mike Pence, you have to understand that he has wanted to be president virtually his entire life, and he will do anything to get it. (Besides being a decent human being with good policy, obviously.)

All of which means: Pence knows if Trump goes down in an election loss in 2020, his own last, best shot at the presidency goes down with it — meaning his best bet is to make sure that Trump goes down via resignation or impeachment. Even election rigging can't help someone who doesn't get nominated.

Four. About that "recent endorsement." Trump publicly asked Pence to be his veep again only after a reporter asked the question, seemingly out of left field, at a press conference. I had an instinct that Pence had planted the question, so I asked if anyone knew who the reporter was, and got the answer: Mark Meredith, who just so happens to have done a ridiculous softball interview with Pence in July.

And in trying to find out more about him, I saw this tweet, which led me to discover he works for Nexstar Media Group, the second largest media group after Sinclair.

So this kid reporter (who is terrible, by the way, if you watch that interview) somehow is a credentialed White House reporter for Nexstar, and just randomly decided to ask if Pence would be on the ticket again. The day after the midterms, in which Trump was delivered a staggering defeat.

And he explained it on Twitter thus: "I thought it was as good as [sic] time as any to ask."

Yeah. And it was just coincidentally the best time for Pence to get his boss to publicly commit to keeping him a heartbeat away from the presidency.

No wonder Trump is getting antsy. He should be.

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So It Turns out That Trump Server Communicating with Russia Was a Big Deal After All (No Kidding)

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, October 08, 2018
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A lot has happened in the last couple of years, so you'll be forgiven if you don't recall the story about the unusual link between a computer server at the Trump Organization and a Russian bank during the campaign.

I first mentioned it in November of 2016, a week before the election, after Franklin Foer wrote an important piece on the subject for Slate, "Was a Trump Server Communicating with Russia?" — and then mentioned it again in March of 2017, when Pamela Brown and Jose Pagliery at CNN reported that the FBI was investigating the server connection, which Foer had described thus in his piece:

The researchers quickly dismissed their initial fear that the logs represented a malware attack. The communication wasn't the work of bots. The irregular pattern of server lookups actually resembled the pattern of human conversation — conversations that began during office hours in New York and continued during office hours in Moscow. It dawned on the researchers that this wasn't an attack, but a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank.
As I said, if none of this is ringing a bell, you're surely not alone. Especially since the political press largely decided there was nothing to that particular story.

Whooooooooooooops.

Dexter Filkins at the New Yorker: Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign?
Examining records for the Trump domain, Max's group discovered D.N.S. lookups from a pair of servers owned by Alfa Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia. Alfa Bank's computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day. There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the total number was notable: Between May and September, Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization's domain more than two thousand times. "We were watching this happen in real time — it was like watching an airplane fly by," Max said. "And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?"

Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization's domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump's ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince's meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was "incidental.") In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren't aware of any of this. "We didn't know who DeVos was," Max said.

The D.N.S. records raised vexing questions. Why was the Trump Organization's domain, set up to send mass-marketing e-mails, conducting such meagre activity? And why were computers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health trying to reach a server that didn't seem to be doing anything? After analyzing the data, Max said, "We decided this was a covert communication channel."

...In August, 2016, Max decided to reveal the data that he and his colleagues had assembled. "If the covert communications were real, this potential threat to our country needed to be known before the election," he said. After some discussion, he and his lawyer decided to hand over the findings to Eric Lichtblau, of the New York Times. Lichtblau met with Max, and began to look at the data.

Lichtblau had done breakthrough reporting on National Security Agency surveillance, and he knew that Max's findings would require sophisticated analysis. D.N.S. lookups are metadata — records that indicate computer interactions but don't necessarily demonstrate human communication. Lichtblau shared the data with three leading computer scientists, and, like Max, they were struck by the unusual traffic on the server. As Lichtblau talked to experts, he became increasingly convinced that the data suggested a substantive connection. "Not only is there clearly something there but there's clearly something that someone has gone to great lengths to conceal," he told me. Jean Camp, of Indiana University, had also vetted some of the data. "These people who should not be communicating are clearly communicating," she said. In order to encourage discussion among analysts, Camp posted a portion of the raw data on her website.

As Lichtblau wrote a draft of an article for the Times, Max's lawyer contacted the F.B.I. to alert agents that a story about Trump would be running in a national publication, and to pass along the data. A few days later, an F.B.I. official called Lichtblau and asked him to come to the Bureau's headquarters, in Washington, D.C.

At the meeting, in late September, 2016, a roomful of officials told Lichtblau that they were looking into potential Russian interference in the election. According to a source who was briefed on the investigation, the Bureau had intelligence from informants suggesting a possible connection between the Trump Organization and Russian banks, but no data. The information from Max's group could be a significant advance. "The F.B.I. was looking for people in the United States who were helping Russia to influence the election," the source said. "It was very important to the Bureau. It was urgent."

The F.B.I. officials asked Lichtblau to delay publishing his story, saying that releasing the news could jeopardize their investigation. As the story sat, Dean Baquet, the Times' executive editor, decided that it would not suffice to report the existence of computer contacts without knowing their purpose. Lichtblau disagreed, arguing that his story contained important news: that the F.B.I. had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian contacts with Trump's aides. "It was a really tense debate," Baquet told me. "If I were the reporter, I would have wanted to run it, too. It felt like there was something there." But, with the election looming, Baquet thought that he could not publish the story without being more confident in its conclusions.
There is much more at the link.

Foer notes on Twitter that Filkins "lands at about the same conclusion I did a few years back: This wasn't random." And further: "Dean Baquet didn't run the Times story on the subject — and he slammed my piece on Alfa to @ErikWemple. But he now says, 'It felt like there was something there.'"

In other words, the New York Times, who it should always be noted were running plenty of bullshit stories about Hillary Clinton's email server, decided not to run a critically important story linking Trump and Russia a week before the election, because editor Dean Baquet wasn't "confident in it conclusions," even though it "felt like there was something there."

Because there was.

Open Wide...
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Joe Biden Is Not the Man for This Moment

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, October 01, 2018
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[Content Note: Sexual harassment; rape culture.]

Joe Biden was never my favorite politician, to put it politely.

Apart from his history of plagiarism, his fondness for misogynist and racist "jokes" and propensity for "gaffes" that sound a lot like bigotry, his record of well-representing Delaware as a sanctuary for credit card companies, and the last year of "I woulda won" bullshit, he's got a permanent stain from his disgraceful performance during the Clarence Thomas nomination, when he was shitty to Anita Hill and refused to call three other witnesses who were prepared to make their own allegations against Thomas.

Today, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin at the New York Times ask: "Biden Is Preparing for 2020. Can He Overcome the Hill-Thomas Hearings?"

"Can he?" The real question is should he (no), and perhaps an even bigger question is why the media is already so inclined to help him "overcome" that dreadful history, only so they can tank him with it in the general election, if he gets there.

I wish I thought Biden were smart enough to know that's exactly what would happen, but I don't think he is. Or rather, I think his ego overwhelms whatever smarts he's got.

Which, among a number of other reasons, makes him categorically not the man for this moment.

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The Republicans Casually Announce Their Coup

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Thursday, September 06, 2018
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Last night, the New York Times published an op-ed authored by an anonymous White House senior official titled: "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration." The subhead reads: "I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations."

That alone is enough that every single one of us should be angry — because it is not the disclosure of a "resistance" within the White House; it is the casual announcement of a coup.

Just yesterday, on the subject of current and former White House staffers who participated in Bob Woodward's book about the administration, I wrote:

To whatever degree Trump is truly inept and dangerous (both of which he certainly is), the people who stick around in his administration, unless and until they are fired, aren't trying to protect the country or the world from Trump. They are trying to protect the conservative agenda from being derailed by him.

Over and over, we are asked to mistake as "keeping him in check" what is in actuality keeping him on track.

These are very different things. And we can't be fooled by traitors who want us to believe they are patriots.
Nothing could have more perfectly anticipated the anonymously-penned op-ed, and its author's mendacious and vainglorious attempt to frame their secret coup as an act of heroism.

The senior official makes plain, just as I observed, that they do not seek to derail Trump's vile agenda, but to protect it from him: "To be clear, ours is not the popular 'resistance' of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous."

Trump, they argue, is not a real Republican, however, and so they must intervene in his presidency. Here, then, is the justification for their "resistance": "Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets, and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright."

This, of course, has long been a popular argument with conservatives who want to distance themselves from Donald Trump's worst behavior, even as they exploit it to achieve their agenda. It has always been wrong and it is wrong now: Trump is not an anomaly of Republican politics, but its inevitable endgame.

But now that his exchange of dogwhistles for bullhorns has leapfrogged the GOP's consolidation of power exponentially forward in two years, and these "heroes" and the interests they represent (which does not include We the People) are ready to resume the veneer of a political party that prizes democracy and doesn't seek to destroy it at every turn, Trump has become less useful.

And so, writes the senior official:
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren't for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.

It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what's right even when Donald Trump won't.

The result is a two-track presidency.
This is not of comfort to me, cold or otherwise. It should not comfort anyone who remains committed to democracy. If these "unsung heroes" truly value democracy, as they claim, then the way forward is not to undermine the sitting president, but to unseat him. To make a principled and visible exit. To argue for his removal. To persuade their colleagues in Congress to do their job and hold this president accountable.

But that would require actual risk and sacrifice. It would require losing their jobs, and it would require letting go of their ability to control the narrative via anonymous op-eds, and it would require risking the conservative agenda.

All of which any person who really cares more about this country than themselves and their political party would do. Especially if they're brazen enough to call themselves "unsung heroes" in the pages of the paper of record.

The fact is: The person who submitted this op-ed and their White House conspirators are not heroes. They are sinister authoritarians who are positioning themselves as defenders of democratic institutions even as they aggressively subvert them.

I loathe Donald Trump as much as any human can, but I love my country. Its stewardship doesn't belong in the hands of these reprobates any more than the president they are willing to undermine but not overthrow.

They want to keep him in place while the GOP consolidates power behind this presidency, whoever is running it. While elections are rigged, while districts are gerrymandered, while votes are suppressed, while dark money funds their candidates, while the judiciary is stacked with corrupt right-wingers, while state legislatures are gerrymandered and stolen, while marginalized people are oppressed, while babies are kept in cages, while class warfare is waged against the 99 percent, while unions are busted, while workers lose their rights, while public education is destroyed, while the environment is irretrievably fucked.

These are not people who value democracy. They are people who want to destroy it on their terms.

Who want to do it with civility.

They are hoping that the rest of us will be grateful — and, more importantly, be quiet — as they covertly take over the presidency as they see fit, until Trump is removed and replaced with someone whose vulgarity won't belie the obscenity of their agenda.

Let us understand this cynical and deplorable manipulation, and never trust a single person who has had anything to do with this administration, not ever again.

* * *

Note: People have naturally been speculating about the author of the piece. Vice President Mike Pence and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats seem to be the most popular suggestions. As I said on Twitter, I don't know if Pence wrote the piece; I do know that he's definitely the kind of person who would. Frankly, so is Coats.

Fun Fact: Mike Pence once wrote a paper about trash calling Dan Coats a Nazi! Really.

Open Wide...
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This Is Exhausting

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, August 31, 2018
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I am exhausted.

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Sarah Huckabee Sanders Is a Propagandist

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Thursday, August 02, 2018
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A friend of mine told me that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had "a fucking meltdown" during the press briefing today, being even more belligerent, evasive, and dishonest than usual.

Which is really saying something.

Twitter reinforces my friend's account of the spectacle.

I didn't see it. I never see the press briefings anymore. Because I don't watch them.

I'm neither judging nor am I criticizing any average person who chooses to watch them, and I certainly don't blame any political writer who is obliged by an employer to watch and report on them.

But I simply won't watch them any longer. I try not to even tweet about them, unless there's something legitimately newsworthy, which is exceedingly rare.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is not providing any good information. It's nothing but lies and spin and attacks. She is a propagandist. That is her job. To disseminate propaganda for the Trump Regime.

And, the truth is, the press should refuse to fucking cover the press briefings unless they contain actual, truthful news.

Otherwise, they're just making themselves propagandists, too.

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We Resist: Day 516

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Tuesday, June 19, 2018
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a black bar with the word RESIST in white text

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

* * *

Earlier today by me: Happy Juneteenth! and Trump's Sadistic Nativism Must Be Stopped.

Here are some more things in the news today...

[Content Note: Nativism; dehumanization; eliminationism; child abuse.]


Meanwhile, in Florida...


Amanda Holpuch at the Guardian: Families Divided at the Border: 'The Most Horrific Immigration Policy I've Ever Seen'.
Janet Gwilym, managing attorney for the Seattle branch of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), an advocacy group for unaccompanied immigrant children, said children aged 12 to 17 had been comforting toddlers who, like them, had just been taken from their parents. She said children had said they were told by immigration officials that they would see their parents again in a few minutes but hadn't seen them for months.

...Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, filed a class-action lawsuit in March against the Trump administration's family separation practice after meeting with a Congolese woman who hadn't seen her seven-year-old daughter for four months. She and her child were reunited after Gelernt filed a lawsuit on their behalf.

"This is as shocking an immigration policy as we've seen from this Trump administration, but frankly, I've been doing this work for approaching three decades, and this is the most horrific immigration policy I have ever seen," Gelernt said.

Gelernt said the detained parents he had been speaking with were afraid to ask immigration agents too much about their children for fear their children would face retaliation.

...Megan McKenna, KIND's senior director of communications and community engagement said KIND was advocating on behalf of a two-year-old who was separated from her father in March. The father was deported within a month, but as of 12 June, the girl was still in the custody of the U.S. government.

"The consequences in terms of human suffering can't be overestimated," McKenna said.
And let's be abundantly fucking clear about this: The vast majority of people being harmed by the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy are not violent gang members who are crossing the border in search of innocent Americans to wantonly kill. The vast majority of people are seeking asylum from violence.

Patrick Timmons at the Guardian: Migrant Parents Separated from Children: 'We Came Because We Didn't Want to Be Killed'.
After sentencing Goulart do Nascimiento to time served for unlawful entry, the magistrate judge Miguel Torres asked him if he wanted to say anything to the court.

"I decided to come to the United States with my wife and two children because if I stayed in Brazil they would kill my entire family," he told Torres, who looked on with dismay.

..."I wanted to go file a complaint against a drug house in my neighborhood," he said. "So I went to the police station to complain about this drug trafficking spot and they told me if I filed a complaint I would be killed. That's when I decided to flee with my wife and children to the United States. I learned yesterday they killed my landlord because he helped us flee to the United States."

"Please forgive me. I came with my entire family because I did not want us to be killed."

...On that day, Juan Francisco Fuentes Castro, 49, was also in the courtroom. Border patrol agents had apprehended him and his two daughters — one recently turned 18, the other 16 — at about 9.30 at night on 1 June. Court documents show the border patrol agent "noticed that the subjects' clothing, from the knees to their feet, was wet." The Salvadoran family had waded the river to enter the United States from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Through a Spanish interpreter, Fuentes Castro implored the court to forgive him. "I felt powerless. El Salvador is going through a terrible moment. The only thing I could think is I had to get my children out of there. I am very sorry."

...Elizabeth González Juárez knows where her daughter is. She had pleaded guilty and been sentenced when the judge asked her if she had anything she wanted to tell the court. A single 30-year-old mother from Guanajuato, Mexico, she said she came to the U.S. because she wanted to protect her three-year-old daughter from her violent father, a drug dealer, who had abused González and her daughter. She told the court she was trying to get to her mother, who lived in Fort Worth, Texas.

Her defense attorney, the federal public defender Darren Ligon, said his client's boyfriend was a gang member in Ciudad Juárez.

"The terrible thing is that the thing my client was attempting most to avoid has actually happened," he said. "Immigration authorities handed her daughter back over to the abusive father at the international bridge. They contacted him in Juárez and he came to pick up his daughter."
Sob. I honestly don't even know what to do other than scream at people with far more influence than I have to do whatever they can to get Trump removed swiftly from office, because there is no convincing him to stop harming children, when harming children he views as "an infestation" is a feature of his immigration agenda, not a bug.

* * *


Note also that the suggestion outrage "plays into their hands" is a narrative deployed in an attempt to deaden resistance. Ignore it. Resist as tenaciously and as loudly as you can.

* * *

Philip Bump at the Washington Post: At Least Six People Close to Trump Almost Certainly Knew About Offers from Russians of Dirt on Clinton. "So we are confident the following people were offered or told about information allegedly incriminating Clinton: George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Michael Caputo, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort. It is possible that the following other people knew about or received similar offers, too: Stephen Miller, Carter Page, J.D. Gordon (if Page was offered dirt), and Donald Trump. Trump's argument has long been that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government. That claim increasingly depends on how one defines 'collusion.'"

Hmm. Does this count?


Meanwhile, the collusion between the Republican Party and Russia predates Trump significantly (which is further evidence of my argument that the Trump presidency is not an outlier of the GOP, but its inevitable endgame):


[CN: Video may autoplay at link] Lauren Said-Moorhouse at CNN: Russia May Have Upgraded Nuclear Bunker in Kaliningrad, Report Says. "Russia may have significantly modernized a nuclear weapons storage bunker in Kaliningrad, a sensitive exclave of Russian territory sandwiched between Poland and the Baltics, as tensions between Russia and the West continue to rise, according to a new report. On Monday, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) published aerial photographs that the group says show the facility in the Baltic outpost has been under major renovation since 2016. FAS said the images document refurbishments at the site back in 2016, when one of three underground bunkers at the location was excavated and deepened before it appeared to have been covered over in recent months, 'presumably to return (to) operational status soon.'"

* * *

Today in possible constitutional crises...


I'm guessing House Republicans will prevent Trump from having to defy Congress, but we'll see.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?

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The Press Promotes an Election Narrative with Little Evidence, But Serves to Conceal Possible Meddling

Posted by SKM at Thursday, June 14, 2018
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Screenshot from June 13 Morning Joe Sanford Loses Reelection Bid After Trump Hits Him in Tweet

Early yesterday morning, I turned on MSNBC to this chyron on Morning Joe: "Sanford Loses Re-Election Bid After Trump Hits Him in Tweet." Here is the tweet in question:


We are meant to believe that Trump swooped in nine hours after the polls opened, dropped a single critical tweet, and Sanford's challenger then won by a healthy 4-point margin. South Carolina mainstream media were certainly quick to promote that narrative. The Charleston Post and Courier framed Arrington's win as a "a monumental upset fueled by a Donald Trump tweet" and further opined that Sanford's defeat "carries national implications."

NBC News, CBS News, and CNN all framed Arrington's victory this way too. CNN claimed, "Support Trump and you have a better-than-average chance of winning in a Republican primary. Oppose him — even occasionally — and run the risk of losing for your apostasy."

Based on Arrington's win and that of white supremacist Virginia senate candidate Corey Stewart, the Washington Post declared, "Trump is the big winner in Tuesday's primaries," and added the strange observation that "It's overly simplistic to say that South Carolina GOP congressman Mark Sanford lost his primary Tuesday because of Trump. But Trump was definitely a factor in making Sanford the second House Republican in 2018 to lose a primary." So it's overly simplistic to credit Trump with Arrington's win, but they're going to do it anyway.

The Washington Post doubled down on this narrative two hours later in The Daily 202: "Mark Sanford's primary loss shows the peril of crossing Trump."

This unified theory of Arrington's win ignores other possible explanations, such as the strong performance of female candidates over the past year, and the trend favoring outsiders and newcomers.

Notice that Donald Trump himself was quick to adopt mainstream media framing. He took credit for Arrington's win, even claiming he bucked his advisors to seal the deal:


But I agree with Dan Lavoie, who tweeted of the Charleston Post and Courier article that it's "Pretty weird — and frankly irresponsible — to run a banner headline asserting facts not in evidence. Trump tweeted three hours before polls closed. Arrington won by 4 full points. It's virtually impossible Trump moved that many voters that late in the day."

This last-minute swoop followed by an upset reminds me of the time Paul Manafort encouraged Trump to go to Michigan on October 31st 2016, right before the presidential election. According to the conservative Weekly Standard, Trump then won Michigan by 0.2%, or roughly 10,700 votes (and he won Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by slim identical margins of 0.7% each).

There has been no audit of the 2016 vote in any state. We do not know if there was tampering with voter rolls, ballot counting, or vote totals. Meanwhile, California-based cybersecurity firm FireEye reports that "it is possible that [hackers] had the ability to modify or delete data" in 2016 and that "U.S. election systems are increasingly at risk for cyberattacks."

Furthermore, The State reported last month [H/T to Shaker Aphra_Behn] that "South Carolina will need a lot more money to secure its elections," adding:
"Securing voter data has been a major focus since the 2016 election, when South Carolina recorded 150,000 attempts to hack into its voter-registration system on Election Day alone. Those were among several attempts to penetrate voting systems reported ahead of the last national election."
So there is evidence that our election systems are not adequately secured.

Additionally, there is remarkably little evidence that Trump has suddenly become so popular that even mild criticism of him is a sure career-ender. He is roughly as popular with the Republican base as he was fifteen months ago, when Republican constituents were lecturing Chuck Grassley about death panels and getting up in Dave Brat's grill wherever he went. Quinnipiac had Trump at 91% approval with GOP voters back then (March 2017) and 82% now (May 10, 2018).

Furthermore, the Washington Post reports that "People who say they're most eager to vote strongly disapprove of Trump." And while Corey Stewart won in Virginia last night, Trump's endorsement didn't pull Ed Gillespie over the line in the governor's race last December, even with the interference of race-baiting bots.

Given Trump's relatively flat approval numbers and the vulnerabilities of our elections systems, we must recognize the possibility that local elections may be fudged and then Trump's intervention invoked as a last-minute game-changer to conceal said fudging.

This possibility is alarming for a host of reasons, not least of which is the Department of Homeland Security's conclusion that "convincing voters that their ballots are secure" is their top ongoing challenge. Why bother to vote if you don't trust that your vote will count?

The Morning Joe segment which opened this post provides one explanation of the puzzling narrative that Trump is too popular to criticize. Joe Scarborough says that "The primary voters in the Republican party have devolved into a Trumpist cult." But on his June 12th show, before any SC primary votes were cast, Scarborough was already setting up this narrative. He told the following anecdote about an unnamed GOP congressman (Morning Joe does not provide transcripts, but the relevant part is at 1:13:27 of the podcast):
I was talking to a Republican that I've known since I first came to Congress in 1994 and he said it was surreal, going around his district having people angry at him for talking about free trade, for talking about the need to balance budgets…and getting on him for suggesting that the president not lie about payoffs to porn stars. He said it is surreal: "People are coming up to me angry in my district because I'm saying the exact same things I've been saying for 25 years."
Scarborough blames primary voters, but his information comes from one old friend in the House, not voters at town halls nationwide.

And on Monday's Morning Joe, Heidi Pryzbyla talked to voters in Michigan who were primarily concerned with health care (1:09:05). An alternative thesis might be that Republican members of congress are afraid of the usual midterm losses for the party in power (or worse). So they preemptively blame their own constituents. I'm sure there are credible stories of cultish constituents, but cable and print news selectively amplify them in unison.

The press is powerful, and right now they run the risk of handing Trump perfect cover for ongoing election interference.

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The Press Is Powerful; They Shouldn't Pretend Otherwise

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Wednesday, June 13, 2018
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Once of the things about which I used to write when George W. Bush was president was his execrable habit of talking about policy like he had no power to influence it; like he wasn't the president.

He was arguably the most powerful person on the planet, and yet he would talk about war and broken levees and healthcare as though they were forces of nature and he was just as powerless as the rest of us to end a war or increase infrastructure spending or broaden access to healthcare.

It wasn't false humility — or, as so much of Bush's wickedness was wrongly attributed to, stupidity. It was a way of rhetorically distancing himself from accountability. To separate himself from the consequences of decisions for which he was responsible, whether via action or inaction.

It was a sly way of implying, over and over, that the presidency itself is less powerful than it is, to deflect both blame and deserved accountability.

This is a terrible habit that members of the press have picked up. They speak about Donald Trump and his presidency, and the narratives about both, as though those narratives emerged fully formed on the pages of newspapers, from another dimension perhaps.

Yesterday, I saw a perfect, terrible example of precisely what I mean. CNN's Ryan Struyk tweeted: "Trump says he got North Korea to commit to destroying a major missile testing site but 'we didn't put it in the agreement because we didn't have time.'" Which CNN commentator Ryan Lizza referenced as he tweeted: "A comment like this from Obama would have defined him on the right for his entire presidency and would have been endlessly repeated as evidence of his naïveté and stupidity. For Trump it's just Monday."

"The right" doesn't come by its narratives in a vacuum. The reason that narrative would have taken hold is because the press — the mainstream press, not just right-wing media — would have endlessly repeated Obama's mistake and are currently treating that comment like it's just Monday for Trump.


Trump has been waging war on the free press since virtually the moment he launched his presidential campaign, and yet large portions of the press — with, of course, notable exceptions who are working diligently to try to hold Trump meaningfully accountable — respond by capitulating to his bullying and becoming his stenographers (with fewer ethics than actual stenographers).

There are a lot of reasons for this, including habitual capitulation to Republican presidents. For example: Check out [Content Note: Disablist language] this piece I wrote in 2006 about media coverage of George W. Bush, and note that I could write virtually the same piece today about coverage of Trump.

But the primary reason is the same reason that Bush had the same deplorable habit: They want to avoid accountability.

Their role in delivering this nightmare president to the White House cannot be understated, even though it was hardly the only reason. They shaped the way the public viewed Trump as a joke; the way the public viewed him as a harmless bit of entertainment; the way the public viewed those of us who were urgently warning from go that he must be taken seriously as an authoritarian threat.

And now they shape the way the public views his authoritarianism as increasingly "normal."

Just another Monday.

The press has power. They shouldn't pretend that they don't. Especially not to avoid the responsibility of profound misuses and abuses of that power, to abet the dismantling of the very democracy they are meant to defend.

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We Resist: Day 501

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Monday, June 04, 2018
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a black bar with the word RESIST in white text

One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures (plus the occasional non-Republican who obliges us to resist their nonsense, too, like we don't have enough to worry about) is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

* * *

Earlier today by me: Giuliani Claims President Couldn't Be Indicted for Murder and The Dominionists Make Their Move.

Here are some more things in the news today...

[Content Note: Sexual harassment] Former President Bill Clinton is on a media tour to promote a fiction book he co-authored with James Patterson, and, during an interview on the Today show, NBC's Craig Melvin asked him about whether the #MeToo movement has changed the lens through which he views his affair with Monica Lewinsky. And his answer was very terrible.

Craig Melvin: [in voiceover] This March, Monica Lewinsky penned an op-ed in Vanity Fair taking responsibility for her part in the scandal, but also admitting that, years later, she was diagnosed with PTSD from the unrelenting public scrutiny. [onscreen, to Bill Clinton] One of the things that this #MeToo era has done, it's forced a lot of women to speak out. One of those women, Monica Lewinsky, she wrote an op-ed that the #MeToo movement changed her view of sexual harassment. Quote: "He was my boss; he was the most powerful man on the planet; he was 27 years my senior with enough life experience to know better; he was, at the time, at the pinnacle of his career, while I was in my first job out of college. Looking back on what happened now, through the lens of #MeToo now, do you think differently? Or feel more responsibility?

Bill Clinton: No, I felt terrible then. And I came to grips with it. And —

Melvin: Did you ever apologize to her?

Clinton: Yes. And nobody believes that I got outta that for free. I left the White House $16 million in debt. But you, typically, have ignored gaping facts in describing this, and I bet you don't even know them. This was litigated 20 years ago; two-thirds of the American people sided with me; they were not insensitive to that. I had a sexual harassment policy when I was governor in the '80s. I had two women chiefs of staff when I was governor. Women were over-represented in the Attorney General's office in the '70s, for their percentage of the bar. I have had nothing but women leaders in my office since I left. You are giving one side and omitting facts.

Melvin: Mr. President, I'm not trying to present a side. I'm not —

Clinton: You asked me if I agreed; the answer is no I don't.

Melvin: And I — well, I asked if you'd ever apologized, and you said you had.

Clinton: I have.

Melvin: You've apologized to her?

Clinton: I've apologized to everybody in the world.
I mean, this is Mitt Romney "binders full of women" level terrible.

And that is worth comment. But it is not worth the outsized coverage it is getting, especially on cable news — because Bill Clinton is not the president anymore and there are far more critical news stories today, like Donald Trump, who is the sitting president, claiming he has the power to pardon himself. For real.


And the news that EPA Chief Scott Pruitt ordered one of his aides to procure a mattress from Trump International Hotel:


This is the way that the Kremlin does business. And now it appears that the White House may be doing business the same way. That is extraordinary and, it shouldn't have to be said, extremely newsworthy.

Which is only the tip of the iceberg of today's news, including two very troubling Supreme Court decisions:


So, yes, absolutely Clinton's dreadful and disappointing (though entirely unsurprising) response is newsworthy, but it is not the most important news of the day by any reasonable calculation. Only by the thoroughly unreasonable calculation that anything the Clintons do warrants endless amounts of scrutiny and alarm while anything Trump does is given a pass for any number of rotating excuses could Bill Clinton be the biggest news of the day.

And, as if on cue...


FOR CRYING OUT LOUD.

I am pissed — pissssssssssssssssed — when progressives fuck up. I couldn't be more annoyed that Samantha Bee used a misogynist slur against Ivanka Trump (both because that's not how feminism works and because I don't want an authoritarian like Ivanka Trump turned into a sympathetic figure), nor more annoyed that Bill Clinton is still defensive over what was a clear case of exploitative workplace sexual harassment, his role in which isn't mitigated by the fact that the Republicans used it to wage a cynical and sanctimousious campaign against him to stymie his political agenda.

But these personal failures, while important because they are also public failures, are simply not as important as the authoritarian takeover by Donald Trump and the Republican Party's consolidation of power behind him, while corporatists wage class warfare and the dominionists relentlessly pursue their objective of a Christian Supremacist nation.


We are fucked. And every day it looks more like the majority of the political media in this country actively wants it that way. This has gone well beyond a mere failure to do their jobs and has entered the territory of conscious participation in the coup.

* * *

In other news...


Michelle Kosinski and Maegan Vazquez at CNN: Trump's Phone Call with Macron Described as 'Terrible'. "A call about trade and migration between [Donald] Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron soured last week after Macron candidly criticized Trump's policies, two sources familiar with the call told CNN. 'Just bad. It was terrible,' one source told CNN. 'Macron thought he would be able to speak his mind, based on the relationship. But Trump can't handle being criticized like that.'" Of course he can't.

[Content Note: White supremacy] Philip Oltermann at the Guardian: New U.S. Ambassador to Germany Under Fire for Rightwing Support. "In an interview with the far-right news outlet Breitbart over the weekend, Richard Grenell, who has been in office for less than a month, said: 'I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders. I think there is a groundswell of conservative policies that are taking hold because of the failed policies of the left.' In Berlin, the foreign ministry asked him to clarify the comments and politicians criticised him for a perceived breach of diplomatic protocol. 'In the past, Germany was fortunate to have had great US ambassadors who built bridges and did not do party politics,' said Metin Hakverdi‪, a Social Democrat delegate and member of the German-US parliamentary friendship group. 'As a member of the SPD, a left party with a long proud legacy of fighting, together with the United States, both Nazis and communists, I am irritated to hear from ambassador Grenell about our allegedly failed policies.'" Holy shit.

Anthony Faiola and Rachelle Krygier at the Washington Post: A Historic Exodus Is Leaving Venezuela without Teachers, Doctors, and Electricians. "This collapsing socialist state is suffering one of the most dramatic outflows of human talent in modern history... Vast gaps in Venezuela's labor market are causing a breakdown in daily life, and robbing this nation of its future. The exodus is broad and deep — an outflow of doctors, engineers, oil workers, bus drivers, and electricians. And teachers." Awful.


Kate Riga at TPM: Facebook Gave Electronics Makers Access to Tons of Users' Personal Data. "Facebook has allowed electronics manufacturers including Apple, Amazon, and Samsung wide access to personal users' data for years, the scope of which may be in violation of an FTC consent rule, according to a Sunday New York Times report. The deals have reportedly given over 60 device makers access to users' friends' data without obtaining consent." Fucking hell.

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?

Open Wide...
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