More tools in the push to rig elections

 

And, adding to the fascist takeover of the country...

UPDATE 03/22/2026:

Seems the fascists are winning

 

And then...

UPDATE 07:55 pm:

Is this what we call the Barbara Streisand effect?

Egg prices are down

 

When you've lost Laura Loomer

 

US Press freedom takes a dive

 

In many ways, they did it to themselves.  

A few newer sources of independent media:

The Contrarian
Democracy Docket
Zeteo
All Rise News

The media have been captured

 

You will bow down

 

UPDATE 02/12/2025:

The oldest profession in the world.  There's never a shortage of whores.

UPDATE 02/15/2025:

UPDATE 02/19/2025:

They never learn

 No matter how many times Trump punks people, there are still people lining up to be punked.

Authoritarianism 101 - control the media

 

MSM continue to bleed

Trump 2.0 - Media

All authoritarian regimes seek to control the media.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Mainstream media bowing to Trump

Joe Scarborough [MSNBC host] went on a long, angry rant today about critics of his visit to Mar-a-Lago: “You can do two things at the same time - you can say he had fascist rhetoric and still go in and talk to him! You know why I do that? To get the read of the man. So I can come back here and tell you what the hell is going on! And give you context, insight and background!”

This comes the morning after frequent Morning Joe guest David Frum wrote an article in The Atlantic about getting kicked off the show yesterday for making a joke about Fox. He said that if Fox hosts were saying that Pete Hegseth had a drinking problem, then he must really have a drinking problem. Frum said he was then asked to leave the show while Joe & Mika read a statement on the air to Fox, since they said they know many people who work there and they should not be disparaged.

Mika: “I just want to say that there’s a lot of good people that work at Fox News who care about Pete Hegseth.”

Frum titled the article, ‘The Sound of Fear on Air'. He wrote that he believed Joe & Mika were too afraid of Trump and right-wingers to effectively do their job. Joe and Mika both went on lengthy rants in response to Frum’s article. It does seem like fear, paranoia, panic and circling the wagons is happening at Morning Joe.

George Conway on Frum’s article: “This is the most-read piece on theatlantic.com. It should be the most-read piece. You should all read it, even though it may make you sad.” Scarborough then also ripped George Conway for making this post recommending Frum’s column on air today.

  Meidas Touch

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09:32 am:  And Fox, of course, is going even further...

Will the media get real?

For many months, media critics and liberal Democrats have insisted that Donald Trump’s mental unfitness for the presidency is—or should be treated as—a big and important news story in and of itself.

[...]

This argument has never received an even remotely serious hearing from newsroom leaders at big media organizations. But it might have just become a bit harder to ignore, now that a well-respected veteran journalist has—in a moment of striking candor—called out his colleagues for failing to take Trump’s mental state seriously as a story in its own right.

“We have a damaged, delusional, old man who again might get reelected to the presidency of the United States,” Mike Barnicle, who served as a longtime columnist for The Boston Globe and other newspapers, said on Morning Joe early Wednesday. Barnicle continued that Trump frequently says “deranged” things in public that “you wouldn’t repeat” on “American television” or “in front of your children.”

“How did we get here?” Barnicle asked. Then he pointed a finger at his media colleagues. “Donald Trump can say whatever crazy things he wants to say, about submarines, and sharks, and electric batteries,” Barnicle said. He noted that such things are “not really covered” as a window into “who the man is” or a sign that he’s “out of his mind.”

[...]

[W]e should pause to appreciate Barnicle’s deeper, underlying point here. It’s that merely covering each of Trump’s hallucinatory claims as news items, even if that includes aggressively fact-checking them, doesn’t do justice to the much bigger story that’s unfolding right at the end of all of our noses.

[...]

Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency deserves sustained journalistic scrutiny as a stand-alone topic with its own intrinsic importance and newsworthiness. Real journalistic resources should be put into meaningfully covering it from multiple angles, as often happens with other big national stories of great consequence.

[...]

[W]hat’s really at issue here is whether the media—as an institution, and in a comprehensive sense—is treating Trump’s mental state as an overarching and critically important factor in determining whether he is fit to be president.

For one thing, even if some of Trump’s whacked-out statements get covered, many do not.[If Biden's age was reason to widely cover his capability, w]hy don’t things like Trump’s obvious cognitive impairment, his frequent inability to speak and think coherently, his resolute refusal to acquire minimal baseline knowledge on many consequential issues, his tendency to invent things on the fly that are wildly disconnected from reality, his intense narcissism, his deliberate lying and bigotry and misogyny—to name just a few traits—also go to his core mental and characterological capacity to do the job as president?

[...]

Serial incoherence, lack of basic curiosity, pathological dishonesty, a tendency toward sadistic verbal abuses of many different kinds—all these things can also plainly be evaluated through the prism of whether they might impair someone from performing the job of president effectively.

[...]

Mike Barnicle’s eruption at his colleagues has put all this squarely on the table. It’s time to take it a lot more seriously—before it’s too late.

  Greg Sargent @ The New Republic

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Media translate for Trump

They don't do it for the Democrats, because they don't have to.  

This is insane.

Here's the video...

It's called Gish Gallop.

And yet, they cheered him.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 03:30 pm:  BTW, he still can't read...

UPDATE 09/06/2024:

Here's a comment from the person who asked the question.  I wonder why she didn't say so at the time.

Speaking of media coverage...

As last Thursday’s CNN interview of Harris and her running mate Tim Walz made clear, she’s resolutely unwilling to let the press — or Trump himself — set the agenda for her presidential campaign. In the process, she’s managed to blunt the tools Trump has repeatedly used to undermine his opponents: drawing them into responding to his schoolyard slights, and turning the media’s pursuit of purportedly “legitimate” questions about his opponents — many of them formulated by GOP partisans — into political weapons.

Harris’s refusal to engage with Trump on his terms represents a break from how Democrats traditionally have dealt with him.

[...]

For years now, Trump has made an art of luring his opponents to wrestle with him in the mud of his racist and misogynist insults and attacks. As a result, Trump has been able to neutralize the impact of (and sometimes even benefit from) his own vile activities and attributes.

[...]

Harris is well aware of how engaging with Trump’s most reprehensible maneuvers and taunts poses the danger of sinking herself into the mud with him, and even allowing him to gain political benefits from what should be massive political missteps — such as Trump’s claim that Harris recently “happened to turn Black.” And Harris, almost alone among Trump’s many political opponents, has come up with an effective strategy for responding to Trump’s gutter politics game: ignoring it.

[...]

Trump has long relied on tempting his adversaries to respond to his insults and bigoted taunts. That is how he has, for years, maintained control of the news cycle and made himself the perpetual center of attention. Harris’s curt dismissal of Trump’s most recent round of racism as a tired replay of a stale show marginalized him more effectively than most any of his adversaries, Republican or Democratic, have ever accomplished.

When a showman like Trump is no longer the center of attention, he turns into that most pathetic of Hollywood creatures: a has-been. With her [refusal to engage with a question about Trump's comment that she just recently "decided" to be black], Harris left Trump standing alone in the pit, covered in mud, with nobody to wrestle.

[...]

[T]he press often asks insipid questions, and indeed can easily by manipulated to serve as conduits for entirely bogus claims and theories pushed by GOP partisans.

[...]

[In the 2016 contest, Hillary] Clinton learned too late that answering the press’s “legitimate” questions made her more, not less, vulnerable. Once the proposition that there was a “scandal” [regarding her emails] had been legitimized, it was inevitable that Clinton would be placed on the defensive for the entire campaign. This situation was relentlessly exploited by Trump, who inevitably lied or otherwise obfuscated when presented with questions about his own shady conduct.

[...]

Harris has, by contrast, learned valuable lessons about the danger of playing by the press’s rules and thereby allowing journalists’ purportedly “legitimate” questions to become a focus of her campaign.

During the initial weeks of Harris’s presidential campaign, members of the press joined the Trump campaign in fulminating over her delay in making herself available for a “tough” interview. Harris met those press demands with a firm (and as soon became clear astute) response: not now.

Harris instead spent those crucial initial weeks introducing herself to voters on her own terms.

[...]

[When Chuck Todd questioned Hillary's changes of position, she] attempted to systematically explain her reasons for each changed position, thereby feeding the claim that she was a sharp operator rather than reasoned and non-dogmatic.

Trump, for his part, refused even to engage with (accurate) claims that he had changed his own mind about the Iraq War, most notoriously by contending that he had always opposed it despite a public record to the contrary. He’s now doing much the same, even more audaciously, on the subject of abortion rights.

Once again, Clinton paid a huge price for playing by the rules, while Trump did not.

As last week’s CNN interview demonstrated, Harris has learned from Clinton’s experiences. Instead of accepting Bash’s framing and “admitting” that she had “flip-flopped,” Harris stated repeatedly that her “values have not changed,” [even when her positions have.]

[...]

The result? Bash’s line of questioning lost its punch for much the same reason that her effort to bait Harris to engage with Trump’s racist taunts failed: because Harris has refused to play by the tired old rules.

  Public Notice

It will be great if she can change the course of political reporting. Next up: treat Trump like the madman he is, and not like a reasoned, articulate political candidate for the presidency.

Trump's abortion stance

It's wobbly.

Due to the echo chamber that is the hallmark of the modern right, they got high on their own supply and convinced themselves the nation wanted Roe gone as badly as they did.

[...]

Abortion rights are resoundingly, durably popular. Pew Research has surveyed Americans on the issue since 1995, and support for abortion being legal in all or most cases has fallen below 50 percent just once, back in 2009. Pew’s most recent research shows that 63 percent of Americans — including 41 percent of Republicans — believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. The Associated Press found that in June 2021, before Roe’s demise, roughly half of Americans thought abortion should be legal for any reason. That jumped to approximately 60 percent in the last two years.

[...]

A New York Times poll conducted last month found that women under 45 report that abortion is now the most critical issue to them, eclipsing even the economy.

  Public Notice

As well it should be. The economy for them is coupled to the size of their family.

A functioning political party led by someone with actual policy goals might consider recalibrating their stance on this issue in order to find a more electable middle ground. Or, a functioning political party could simply dig in, fully embracing the anti-choice side and hoping that the party base would turn out in ample enough numbers. But this is the GOP, and Trump is Trump, so they’ve instead settled on a mishmash of lies and backtracking and are hoping that carries the day.

Trump’s problem with abortion is personally acute because he lives in Florida, which is one of 10 states with an abortion question on the ballot.

Florida’s ballot measure would amend the state constitution by adding a provision stating that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” This would have the effect of invalidating the state’s current six-week abortion ban, which has been in effect since May. The amendment has strong support, with 69 percent of Florida voters surveyed in July saying they would vote for it.

[...]

At the time of Roe, fetal viability was pegged at roughly 28 weeks, but by the time of another landmark abortion rights decision nearly 30 years later [with medical advancements for premature babies], the Supreme Court allowed abortion restrictions to begin around 23-24 weeks.

[...]

Florida’s current six-week ban is a fetal heartbeat law, banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. But what is detected at six weeks is nothing but electrical impulses, as the valves that create a “heartbeat” don’t even exist yet.

[...]

The Florida Supreme Court had previously ruled, back in 1989, that the privacy clause found in the state’s constitution explicitly protected abortion. But earlier this year, in letting the six-week ban go into effect, the court decided it had been wrong all along in how it interpreted the privacy clause, and magically, it no longer protected abortion.

[...]

When first asked by NBC last Thursday about how he would vote on the amendment, given he is a Florida resident, he confusingly declared, “I think the six week is too short, there has to be more time.”

He also said, "I told them that I want more weeks. [...] I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.dd" No. No, he's not. Because how many weeks he wants isn't on the ballot.

That same day, Trump’s campaign issued a “clarification” that he had not yet said how he would vote on the ballot initiative but that six weeks is too short for a ban. The next day, though, during a friendly chat with a Fox News correspondent, Trump declared that he would be voting against the measure, not for any coherent reason, but because he believes blue states kill babies after they are born: "That way you can do an abortion in the ninth month. And, you know, some of the states, like Minnesota and other states have it where you can actually execute the baby after birth, and all of that stuff is unacceptable. So I'll be voting no for that reason.”

He keeps promoting that lie that states allow babies to be killed after birth. At any rate, he says he'll be voting no. In other words, he'll vote to keep the six week ban. And even if he's voting to prevent babies who are already born to be killed, or in the ninth month, this law only protects abortion rights up to the moment of fetal viability, and therefore, he could vote yes. So, as always, everything he says is bullshit.

Imagine Kamala Harris not being able to articulate her position on abortion and reversing herself within 24 hours and having it being reported as merely a clarification or simply mixed signals, as the media did for Trump here. The elite press is also willing to uncritically report Trump’s Hail Mary moves on reproductive health, such as his recent assertion that he would make IVF free. (His campaign has no explanation as to how this would be funded.) Further, no one is pressing him on how he’d require universal coverage for IVF, a thing opposed by many religious conservatives, when his administration previously helmed an effort to allow religious employers to opt out of providing birth control.

There’s no earthly reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. Besides dismantling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, the Trump administration also tried to undermine private insurance coverage for abortions, prohibited clinics from receiving federal funds under Title X if they even referred people elsewhere for abortion services, and slashed grants for teen pregnancy prevention programs. A second Trump administration will be comprehensively terrible for reproductive rights generally, not just abortion, and no amount of uninformed flip-flopping will change that.

The media don't try to hold him to standards of any other political candidate.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump "press conference"

That reminds me: I saw a sign on Hwy 55 in Illinois that said "Armed citizens  prevent 2 million crimes every year.  1) I'm gonna need to see some official statistics; and 2) How many crimes do armed citizens commit every year?

"Tempered down"?  And he says everybody, including liberals, wanted the abortion issue back in the purview of the states.

Also...Trump TV is running scams every time they air him speaking.

Does he know there's a way to find out if he really wants to know?

Wow.  There's an endorsement to envy.

Why couldn't they get mikes on the questioners?

You know, why don't you just google the whole insane mess of a Trump "press conference".  I'm sick of this jerkwad.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 08/09/2024:  "Vast well of stupidity" in his brain.

Lawrence O'Donnell takes the media to task.

And, that's just what they are: stories.

Former President Donald J. Trump told a jaw-dropping story on Thursday about nearly dying in a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, the former California politician and ex-boyfriend of his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

There was only one problem with the story. Or maybe two. Or maybe three.

It wasn’t the famous former San Francisco mayor on the helicopter flight at all. It was Gov. Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, who bears little resemblance to Willie Brown.

  NYT

That's a joke, son. One is white, the other is black.

There was also no emergency landing, and the helicopter’s passengers were never in any danger at all, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was also on the flight.

They should start calling Trump Hillary. During his campaign against her, she recalled an incident when she was in a helicopter that was under fire. Never happened.

Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019, said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”

[...]

Mr. Trump’s errant account, delivered during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, came in response to a reporter who asked a leading question about Ms. Harris’s past relationship with Willie Brown, and whether Mr. Trump thought it might have had something to do with her career trajectory.

The two dated in 1994 and 1995, while she was a prosecutor in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, and he was the speaker of the California State Assembly, and he appointed her to two state boards. He was — and still is — married to Blanche Brown, but they have long lived separate lives.

Both Jerry Brown, left, and Willie Brown, refuted Mr. Trump's story of a helicopter ride gone wrong.

And, there's THIS angle about crowd size...

UPDATE 08/09/2024 :