Democrats’ Justified Growing Frustration with An Irresponsible News Media

“He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists
and criminals,” Beto O’Rourke said of Trump.

The mainstream media's false equivalency in news coverage during the 2016 presidential election helped elect Donald Trump.  Sadly, the problem continues and belatedly Democrats are beginning to call out lazy and irresponsible journalists and media outlets. There is ZERO equivalence between Trump/GOP lies and fact, data and science based Democrat  positions, yet one would rarely get that message from even outlets like the New York Times that fail to take on outright lies and/or continue to broadcast untrue propaganda.  If one is a responsible journalist, you do NOT merely parrot a lie or hate speech and never call out the individual lying or disseminating false and/or racist statements. The Founding Fathers saw the free press as the bulwark of protection against dishonest politicians and policies, yet too much of the media has failed to fulfill its critical role in safeguarding both the truth and democracy itself. A piece in Politico looks at the long overdue backlash against an often complicit media.   Here are excerpts:

A liberal backlash against the news media’s coverage of Donald Trump and the 2020 race was already brewing when the New York Times published a five-word headline Monday night summarizing the president’s reaction to the mass shootings over the weekend: “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism.”

“Unbelievable,” steamed Beto O’Rourke. “That’s not what happened,” wrote Kirsten Gillibrand. “Lives literally depend on you doing better,” Cory Booker tweeted.

New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said senior editors quickly recognized problems with the original headline Monday night and rewrote it. “The fact that Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker didn’t like it didn’t influence me,” Baquet said in an interview Tuesday. “I don’t need the entire political field to tell me we wrote a bad headline. It was evident.”

Still, the furious response capped an outpouring of frustration lately from 2020 candidates, Democratic strategists and left-leaning columnists over everything from CNN’s handling of last week’s primary debate to coverage of race and white supremacists to the years-old gripe that news organizations are too willing to amplify Trump’s words.

O’Rourke channeled that discontent best Sunday with an exasperated reaction to a reporter’s question about what Trump could do in response to the deaths of 22 people in El Paso at the hands of a suspected white nationalist.

“He’s been calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals,” O’Rourke responded. “Members of the press, what the fuck?”

Neera Tanden, the president of the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, told POLITICO that O’Rourke “spoke for millions of liberals” with those three words.

“If you’re thinking, ‘Can Trump make this better?’ you’re absolving him of his role in this, and it makes people think you don’t get it,” Tanden said.

Democrats and progressives expressed some frustration with the media in 2016, claiming that journalists neglected Sen. Bernie Sanders early on and that they were obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s emails. And Democrats are quick to distinguish their critique of the news media from that of the right, especially Trump’s attacks on journalists as “the enemy of the people.” O’Rourke, for one, has told crowds that the media is not the “enemy,” and nearly every Democratic campaign has vowed to bring back White House press briefings if elected.

Still, the critique of the news media is cropping up more as the 2020 presidential campaign heats up, including during the primary debates hosted by CNN. And it has the potential to hurt the news business’ reputation with a large chunk of the electorate, just as Republican voters became less inclined to trust the mainstream media after years of candidates decrying what they viewed as liberal bias.

“A vast swath of Democratic voters are pretty angry at the media,” . . . . They see a media obsessed with Trump voters who like his rhetoric and little interest in those targeted by his rhetoric. I think Beto's comments spoke to a feeling that media as currently constructed is not up to the moment we are living in." Brian Fallon, who served as deputy press secretary for Clinton’s 2016 campaign and is now executive director of progressive organization Demand Justice, told POLITICO on Monday afternoon that “a lot of Democrats are understandably exasperated about the broken state of the media in the age of Trump.” “Instead of the media standing up against his lies, we get thought pieces about whether the truth really matters anymore,” he continued. “Instead of calling out Trump's racism, we see headline writers engaged in acrobatics designed to achieve some false measure of objectivity.”

On Monday night, Fallon was one of the prominent progressive critics to pounce on the Times’s initial headline choice about Trump’s press conference on the shootings. Editor Baquet "cares more about being seen as impartial by diehard supporters of Donald Trump than he does about faithfully representing what is happening in American politics,” Fallon tweeted.

Some liberal Times subscribers, however, disagree. The hashtag #CancelNYT was trending Tuesday morning. Adam Jentleson, who served as deputy chief of staff to former Sen. Harry Reid, said on Twitter that he was going to do just that.

“I resisted for a long time but I’m cancelling my NYT subscription today,” he tweeted. “Great reporters but terrible editorial judgment on headlines and social media, which is all most people read. It can’t be the paper of record anymore if it doesn’t accurately report the news.”

Appeasing Trump and/or his base is NOT what a responsible journalist does. Instead, exposing lies and racist and misogynist fear mongering is what needs to be done.

Trump’s Tax Returns: 1985-1994, Show Massive $1.17 Billion Loss

Trump spent $365 million in 1989 to buy a shuttle operation from Eastern Airlines. It never turned a profit.

Sorry, but I can only find this news from a lengthy article the New York Times to be very sweet indeed.  Yes, the period involved is from years ago, but the huge losses reflected may suggest why Trump doesn't want House Democrats to see his tax returns for the last six years since they might undercut the image he has sold to his cult followers - or provide leads to illicit income.  The story strongly suggests that if there is any "fake news" it is Trump's "success" story that he has been disseminating for years. One can only imagine the Twitter storm that will ensue from the malignant narcissist -in-chief over the Times putting out some of the truth about him - including the many years he paid no taxes.  My view: Trump is a liar, fraud and con-artist who has lived by duping and screwing others financially.  Now he is screwing the entire nation and his cult followers are too stupid and/or bigoted to realize they have been conned. Here are some article highlights:

By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.

Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.

Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse. 

The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.

In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners.

Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years. It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.

Since the 2016 presidential campaign, journalists at The Times and elsewhere have been trying to piece together Mr. Trump’s complex and concealed finances. While The Times did not obtain the president’s actual tax returns, it received the information contained in the returns from someone who had legal access to it. The Times was then able to find matching results in the I.R.S. information on top earners — a publicly available database that each year comprises a one-third sampling of those taxpayers, with identifying details removed. It also confirmed significant findings using other public documents, along with confidential Trump family tax and financial records from the newspaper’s 2018 investigation into the origin of the president’s wealth.

Mark J. Mazur, a former director of research, analysis and statistics at the I.R.S., said that, far from being considered unreliable, data used to create such transcripts had undergone quality control for decades and had been used to analyze economic trends and set national policy. In addition, I.R.S. auditors often refer to the transcripts as “handy” summaries of tax returns, said Mr. Mazur, now director of the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington.

In fact, the source of The Times’s newly obtained information was able to provide several years of unpublished tax figures from the president’s father, the builder Fred C. Trump. They matched up precisely with Fred Trump’s actual returns, which had been obtained by The Times in the earlier investigation.

Mr. Trump built a business licensing his name, became a television celebrity and ran for the White House by branding himself a self-made billionaire. . . . Yet over the years, the actual extent of his wealth has been the subject of much doubt and debate. He broke with four decades of precedent in refusing to release any of his tax returns as a presidential candidate, and until now only a few pages of his returns have become public. Last year’s Times investigation found that he had received at least $413 million in 2018 dollars from his father. The new tax information does not answer questions raised by House Democrats in their pursuit of the last six years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns — about his recent business dealings and possible foreign sources of financing and influence. Nor does it offer a fundamentally new narrative of his picaresque career.

But in the granular detail of tax results, it gives a precise accounting of [Trump's] the president’s financial failures and of the constantly shifting focus that would characterize his decades in business. In contrast to his father’s stable and profitable empire of rental apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Trump’s primary sources of income changed year after year, from big stock earnings, to a single year of more than $67.1 million in salary, to a mysterious $52.9 million windfall in interest income. But always, those gains were overwhelmed by losses on his casinos and other projects.

The new information also suggests that Mr. Trump’s 1990 collapse might have struck several years earlier if not for his brief side career posing as a corporate raider.

In New York, the attorney general’s office is investigating the financing of several major Trump Organization projects; Deutsche Bank has already begun turning over documents. The state attorney general is also examining issues raised last year by The Times’s investigation, which revealed that much of the money Mr. Trump had received from his father came from his participation in dubious tax schemes, including instances of outright fraud.

The 10-year total: $1.17 billion in losses.

Mr. Trump was able to lose all that money without facing the usual consequences — such as a steep drop in his standard of living — in part because most of it belonged to others, to the banks and bond investors who had supplied the cash to fuel his acquisitions. And as The Times’s earlier investigation showed, Mr. Trump secretly leaned on his father’s wealth to continue living like a winner and to stage a comeback.

Why Ralph Northam Should Not Resign

Add caption

This will be the last post on this topic hopefully for a while.  A great column in the New York Times lays out why the Democrats' insane, "no forgiveness ever" policy needs to be put on the trash heap.  Yes, the subject of the column is Ralph Northam, who the husband and I truly count as a personal friend - not just someone I name drop as some have alleged in nasty comments on Facebook - but the overall premise is, to me, 100% on point and needs to be heeded by both Democrats and Republicans if we are not to find ourselves in a dark place where one's entire life is ruined by foolish mistakes in the past.  And let's be honest as the column reminds us, most of us are guilty of some act or statement that under the Democrats' insane standard would damn us for life.  We've merely been lucky and not publicly exposed since we are not in the public eye.  It also reminds us that he/she who is totally without any sin is the only one fit to cast the first stone.  (Sadly, these concepts were lost on Equality Virginia which joined the rush to judgment and has perhaps permanently lost my support as a result, if I apply the no forgiveness ever standard EV embraced)  Here are column excerpts:

It’s probably for the best that Ralph Northam seems determined not to resign as governor of Virginia. He may have done something ugly and dumb many years ago, when he was a young man and prevailing notions of socially permissible behavior were uglier and dumber than they are today.

In the 35 years between those two points he has, by all appearances, lived an upstanding life without a hint of racial bias. If we are going to embrace a politics where that’s not enough to save a sitting governor accused of no crime, we’re headed toward a dark place.

I write this as someone who isn’t a Democrat and doesn’t share many of Northam’s views. Nor do I think he covered himself in glory when he accused his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, of “racist rhetoric” during the 2017 gubernatorial race, while an advocacy group allied to his campaign ran an ad that made out Gillespie supporters to be homicidal bigots intent on harming minority kids. What goes around comes around, and the temptation for schadenfreude is great.

Then again, each of us might want to perform an internal audit before we join the cast-the-first-stone coalition.

Ever told — or laughed at — a bigoted joke? I have, and I cringe today at what I once found funny. Ever used one of the more common ethnic or sexist slurs — “gypped,” for instance, or “bitch” — or dropped the f-word as it commonly refers to gay people? I’ve been guilty of this too, to my shame. Have ugly generalizations or snap judgments based on ethnic stereotypes perambulated through your mind, even if they didn’t fall out of your mouth? Guilty again.

I admit to all of this not as a form of moral — or immoral — exhibitionism, but because I think it’s true of the overwhelming majority of people irrespective of their race or gender. (If you don’t agree, audit yourself twice.) Few of us are proud of these lapses. Many of us are trying to be considerably more mindful about them. But most of us don’t rip ourselves to pieces over them, either.

That’s because we believe that our worst moments and dumbest utterances shouldn’t define us. That our youthful behavior is more of a reflection of what is around us than a representation of what’s inside. That we deserve to be judged by the decency of our intentions and the totality of our deeds. That we are entitled to a presumption of innocence, a measure of forgiveness, a sense for our times, and multiple opportunities for redemption.

Should Jesse Jackson’s entire life come down to the anti-Semitic words “Hymietown,” uttered by him in 1984 (and comically immortalized by Eddie Murphy)? Should Prince Harry forever be remembered as the royal who dressed as a Nazi? What about Joy Reid’s virulently homophobic blog posts, or Joe Biden’s racially condescending description of Barack Obama as “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean”?

As I said, this is taking us to a dark place. It is hard enough for ordinary, decent people, aware of their shortcomings and capable of shame, to contemplate a career in politics; why would they ever do so if the statute of limitations on past indiscretions never expires? And if they won’t run, aren’t they just ceding the field to those with no shame?

Ralph Northam needs to clear up just who’s in that photo, so Virginians won’t think he’s lying. And he has an opportunity to speak powerfully about the legacy of a casual racism that tainted his generation of Virginians, and about the need for repentance and redemption. The best way for him to do so is as governor.

Trump's Presidency Is a Joke, But It's Not a Laughing Matter

I make no effort to veil my contempt for Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer on this blog, or those who voted for him be it due to greed, racism, religious extremism or projection on Washington rather than a focus on one's own bad choices.  In the short time he has been in office, the damage done to America's reputation and the regulatory scheme to protect the public and the environment has been enormous.  Add to this the growing desire of journalists to expose possible treason by  Der Trumpenführer and his minions, and the foul narcissist has much to worry about.  Yet, like most who view themselves to above the law and smarter than everyone else, Trump will tell himself that all is well.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at Trump's disastrous term to date and why decent, patriotic Americans need to be highly worried.  Here are excerpts:

It can reasonably be said that our dear leader is now the most ridiculed man on the planet. In fact, he may well be the most ridiculed man in history. For a preening narcissist who takes himself terribly seriously, being the butt of the joke heard round the world has got to hurt. The handpicked assortment of craven nitwits and supplicants that he has surrounded himself with have valiantly tried to insulate him from the derision. But they’re only human. . . . . Hats off to them for their tenacity, but no amount of spin is going to change the fact that the Trump White House, like the company its inhabitant has run for the past four decades, continues to be a shambolic mess.

Trump’s one brief moment of acting presidential—when he read off a teleprompter for 60 minutes and 10 seconds during his address to Congress—served only to show just how low the bar for presidential behavior has plummeted since January. Watching TV commentators applaud him for containing himself for a little over an hour was like hearing a parent praise a difficult child for not pooping in his pants during a pre-school interview. 

Trump may be a joke, but the chaos and destructive forces around him are not. If he can cause this much havoc during his first few months in office, imagine what the country and the world will look like at the end of four years. Watch him when he walks into a crowd of people. There is a slight grimace, a tightening of the mouth that to me indicates a hesitation, perhaps based on fear. The thing is, if Trump has made any sort of arrangement with the Russians—Kremlin, oligarchs, F.S.B., Mob, or any combination of the four—to drop the Obama-era sanctions in return for past favors, the hoo-ha surrounding his Russian connections now makes that almost impossible to deliver. Whatever support he has received from the Russians over the years presumably came with promises of a payback. If Trump can’t follow through on this, he might be in serious trouble. 

That Trump’s supporters continue to line up behind him remains a mystery. For the Republican leadership—the Vichy Republicans, as they have been labeled—their collaboration will bear a stiff price down the road. As for the president’s followers out in the country, their air, their water, their national parks, their pensions, and their health care are all in jeopardy from planned legislation and from regulatory rollbacks already in place. I can understand the desire to effect dramatic change in Washington, but this is like being frustrated with your doctor and calling in the man who sold you aluminum siding to handle your physical.

Trump’s war with the press may have enjoyed favorable short-term results with his acolytes, but this is a skirmish he simply cannot win. Sprawling, complex stories like Watergate—or Kremlingate, for that matter—are anything but straightforward affairs, and for the reporters trying to make sense of things, it is akin to assembling a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. It takes time, but eventually the puzzle comes together. And as it was more than four decades ago, you’ve got two great news organizations, The New York Times and The Washington Post, in complete rut over who will get the goods first. The Post wants to reclaim the position it had after it toppled a president, in the wake of Watergate. And the Times is out to make sure that the Post doesn’t have a repeat. When the dust settles, the real history will begin. There might be the occasional hack willing to trot out some semi-fictional hagiography on this administration. But, in the end, proper historians and serious journalists will descend in droves to mop up the lies, the half-truths, and the criminality. Trump’s legacy and that of his family could end up in tatters. The self-lauded Trump brand may well wind up as toxic as the once self-lauded brand of another New York-Palm Beach family: the Madoffs.

I hope the author is right and either the Times, the Post or some other new outlet gets the goods on Trump and set the wheels in motion for Trump and his surrogates and henchmen to be convicted of treason and sentenced accordingly.  It would be icing on the cake if some of the GOP Congressional leadership went down along with them. 

Claims of Trump Sexual Predator Behavior Multiply

As I have noted in Facebook posts and elsewhere, perhaps having daughters of my own and, now, granddaughters, I take claims of sexual abuse of women by powerful figures and the objectification of women seriously.   The irony, of course, is that Donald Trump's manly men supporters and profosseional Christian parasites seem utterly un-phased by Donald Trump's 2005 "hot mic" tape. Who would have thought a gay man would uphold the dignity of women and chivalry, if you will, more so than heterosexual men and "godly Christians."  Tonight, the New York Times, the Palm Beach Post and BuzzFeed are all publishing stories that would demonstrate that the Trump revealed in the 2005 tape is the real Donald Trump.  While the Trump campaign is denying the validity of the claims and threatening lawsuits, I tend to believe the stories of the accusers.  As for the lawsuit threats, if the stories are true, Trump would be insane to file lawsuits given the discovery power that would be gifted to the defendants in the lawsuits.   Here are highlights from the New York Times story:

Donald J. Trump was emphatic in the second presidential debate: Yes, he had boasted about kissing women without permission and grabbing their genitals. But he had never actually done those things, he said.

“No,” he declared under questioning on Sunday evening, “I have not.”

At that moment, sitting at home in Manhattan, Jessica Leeds, 74, felt he was lying to her face. “I wanted to punch the screen,” she said in an interview in her apartment.
More than three decades ago, when she was a traveling businesswoman at a paper company, Ms. Leeds said, she sat beside Mr. Trump in the first-class cabin of a flight to New York. They had never met before.

About 45 minutes after takeoff, she recalled, Mr. Trump lifted the armrest and began to touch her.  According to Ms. Leeds, Mr. Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt.  “He was like an octopus,” she said. “His hands were everywhere.”
She fled to the back of the plane. “It was an assault,” she said.

Ms. Leeds has told the story to at least four people close to her, who also spoke with The New York Times.

Mr. Trump’s claim that his crude words had never turned into actions was similarly infuriating to a woman watching on Sunday night in Ohio: Rachel Crooks.

Ms. Crooks was a 22-year-old receptionist at Bayrock Group, a real estate investment and development company in Trump Tower in Manhattan, when she encountered Mr. Trump outside an elevator in the building one morning in 2005.

Aware that her company did business with Mr. Trump, she turned and introduced herself. They shook hands, but Mr. Trump would not let go, she said. Instead, he began kissing her cheeks. Then, she said, he “kissed me directly on the mouth.” It didn’t feel like an accident, she said. It felt like a violation.

“It was so inappropriate,” Ms. Crooks recalled in an interview. “I was so upset that he thought I was so insignificant that he could do that.”

In the days since Mr. Trump’s campaign was jolted by a 2005 recording that caught him bragging about pushing himself on women, he has insisted, as have his aides, that it was simply macho bluster. “It’s just words,” he has said repeatedly.

And his hope for salvaging his candidacy rests heavily on whether voters believe that claim.

They should not, say Ms. Leeds and Ms. Crooks, whose stories have never been made public before. And their accounts echo those of other women who have previously come forward, like Temple Taggart, a former Miss Utah, who said that Mr. Trump kissed her on the mouth more than once when she was a 21-year-old pageant contestant.

They said they were sickened by what they heard. “It made me shake,” said Linda Ross, a neighbor and friend who spoke with Ms. Leeds about the interaction about six months ago. Like several of Ms. Leeds’s friends, Ms. Ross encouraged her to tell her story to the news media. Ms. Leeds had resisted until Sunday’s debate, which she watched with Ms. Ross.

When Mr. Trump denied having ever sexually assaulted women, in response to a question from Anderson Cooper of CNN, Ms. Ross said she immediately looked at Ms. Leeds in disbelief. “Now we know he lied straight up,” Ms. Ross recalled saying.

There is more. Read the entire piece.  The Palm Beach Post accounts are similar to those in the Times.   What is more disturbing to me is the BuzzFeed story that recounts Trump's walking in on naked Miss Teen USA contestants, some of whom were a  mere 15 years of age.  Here are highlights:

BuzzFeed has an explosive new story out this morning accusing Donald Trump of walking in on teen beauty queens, one as young as 15, while they were undressed during a Miss Teen USA pageant in 1997.

Mariah Billado, former Miss Vermont Teen USA, allegedly complained to Ivanka about her father’s intrusion, with Ivanka reportedly saying, “Yeah, he does that

These new allegation mirror what Trump told Howard Stern in 2005 when he bragged that he’d go backstage before the show to make sure “everything is good.” From CNN:

“Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that before a show, I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it,” Trump said. “You know, I’m inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good.”

The man is beyond disgusting.  So to are his supporters.  When Hillary Clinton called Trump's supporters as "deporables." she was more accurate than she knew. 

Why Donald Trump Should Not Be President

Yesterday the New York Times made the case for electing Hillary Clinton as president on November 8, 2016.  Today, as promised the Times makes the case of why Donald Trump should never be elected to the presidency.  It is a strong piece, but, in my view 100% on the money.  Indeed, it is less scathing than it ought to be given the ugliness of Trump's personality and supposed policies. Trump simply is unfit for office - any elected office, in fact.  Here are excerpts from the editorial:

When Donald Trump began his improbable run for president 15 months ago, he offered his wealth and television celebrity as credentials, then slyly added a twist of fear mongering about Mexican “rapists” flooding across the Southern border.

From that moment of combustion, it became clear that Mr. Trump’s views were matters of dangerous impulse and cynical pandering rather than thoughtful politics.  . . . he has demonstrated in a freewheeling campaign marked by bursts of false and outrageous allegations, personal insults, xenophobic nationalism, unapologetic sexism and positions that shift according to his audience and his whims.

Here’s how Mr. Trump is selling himself and why he can’t be believed.

Despite his towering properties, Mr. Trump has a record rife with bankruptcies and sketchy ventures like Trump University, which authorities are investigating after numerous complaints of fraud. His name has been chiseled off his failed casinos in Atlantic City.

Mr. Trump’s brazen refusal to disclose his tax returns — as Mrs. Clinton and other nominees for decades have done — should sharpen voter wariness of his business and charitable operations. Disclosure would undoubtedly raise numerous red flags; the public record already indicates that in at least some years he made full use of available loopholes and paid no taxes.

Mr. Trump has been opaque about his questionable global investments in Russia and elsewhere, which could present conflicts of interest as president . . . 

Mr. Trump, who has no experience in national security, declares that he has a plan to soundly defeat the Islamic State militants in Syria, but won’t reveal it, bobbing and weaving about whether he would commit ground troops. Voters cannot judge whether he has any idea what he’s talking about without an outline of his plan, yet Mr. Trump ludicrously insists he must not tip off the enemy.

Whatever his gyrations, Mr. Trump always does make clear where his heart lies — with the anti-immigrant, nativist and racist signals that he scurrilously employed to build his base.

Since his campaign began, NBC News has tabulated that Mr. Trump has made 117 distinct policy shifts on 20 major issues, . . . . He said he would “loosen” libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations that displease him.

His plan for cutting the national debt was far from a confidence builder: He said he might try to persuade creditors to accept less than the government owed. This fanciful notion, imported from Mr. Trump’s debt-steeped real estate world, would undermine faith in the government and the stability of global financial markets.

Numerous experts on national defense and international affairs have recoiled at the thought of his commanding the nuclear arsenal. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell privately called Mr. Trump “an international pariah.” Mr. Trump has repeatedly denounced global warming as a “hoax,” although a golf course he owns in Ireland is citing global warming in seeking to build a protective wall against a rising sea.

In expressing admiration for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Mr. Trump implies acceptance of Mr. Putin’s dictatorial abuse of critics and dissenters, some of whom have turned up murdered, and Mr. Putin’s vicious crackdown on the press. Even worse was Mr. Trump’s urging Russia to meddle in the presidential campaign by hacking the email of former Secretary of State Clinton. Voters should consider what sort of deals Mr. Putin might obtain if Mr. Trump, his admirer, wins the White House.

[V]voters should be asking themselves if Mr. Trump will deliver the kind of change they want. Starting a series of trade wars is a recipe for recession, not for new American jobs. Blowing a hole in the deficit by cutting taxes for the wealthy will not secure Americans’ financial future, and alienating our allies won’t protect our security. . . . . The list goes on . . .

In all these areas, Mrs. Clinton has offered constructive proposals. He has offered bluster, or nothing. The most specific domestic policy he has put forward, on tax breaks for child care, would tilt toward the wealthy.

Voters attracted by the force of the Trump personality should pause and take note of the precise qualities he exudes as an audaciously different politician: bluster, savage mockery of those who challenge him, degrading comments about women, mendacity, crude generalizations about nations and religions. Our presidents are role models for generations of our children. Is this the example we want for them?

Should Trump win on November 8, 2016, it will be proof to me that America is utterly morally bankrupt and that it might indeed be time to consider emigrating before America slides into fascism or worse.. 

New York Times - Hillary Clinton for President

Not surprisingly, the New York Times has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.  In doing so, today's editorial does not tear apart Donald trump - that will come in a separate editorial tomorrow - and makes the argument as to why the undecided or Republicans who find Trump repulsive, should cast their vote for Clinton.  Yes, it may be a case of settling for the lesser of two evils in the minds of some, but the reality is that either Trump or Clinton will be president and that Gary Johnson and Jill Stein will not.  Thus, it is critical that we make sure that the lesser evil is elected and that Trump goes down to defeat.  Here are editorial highlights:

In any normal election year, we’d compare the two presidential candidates side by side on the issues. But this is not a normal election year. A comparison like that would be an empty exercise in a race where one candidate — our choice, Hillary Clinton — has a record of service and a raft of pragmatic ideas, and the other, Donald Trump, discloses nothing concrete about himself or his plans while promising the moon and offering the stars on layaway. (We will explain in a subsequent editorial why we believe Mr. Trump to be the worst nominee put forward by a major party in modern American history.)

But this endorsement would also be an empty exercise if it merely affirmed the choice of Clinton supporters. We’re aiming instead to persuade those of you who are hesitating to vote for Mrs. Clinton — because you are reluctant to vote for a Democrat, or for another Clinton, or for a candidate who might appear, on the surface, not to offer change from an establishment that seems indifferent and a political system that seems broken.

The next president will take office with bigoted, tribalist movements and their leaders on the march. In the Middle East and across Asia, in Russia and Eastern Europe, even in Britain and the United States, war, terrorism and the pressures of globalization are eroding democratic values, fraying alliances and challenging the ideals of tolerance and charity.

The 2016 campaign has brought to the surface the despair and rage of poor and middle-class Americans who say their government has done little to ease the burdens that recession, technological change, foreign competition and war have heaped on their families.

Over 40 years in public life, Hillary Clinton has studied these forces and weighed responses to these problems. Our endorsement is rooted in respect for her intellect, experience, toughness and courage over a career of almost continuous public service, often as the first or only woman in the arena.

Mrs. Clinton’s work has been defined more by incremental successes than by moments of transformational change. . . . It shows a determined leader intent on creating opportunity for struggling Americans at a time of economic upheaval and on ensuring that the United States remains a force for good in an often brutal world.

Similarly, Mrs. Clinton’s occasional missteps, combined with attacks on her trustworthiness, have distorted perceptions of her character. She is one of the most tenacious politicians of her generation, whose willingness to study and correct course is rare in an age of unyielding partisanship.

Mrs. Clinton and her team have produced detailed proposals on crime, policing and race relations, debt-free college and small-business incentives, climate change and affordable broadband. Most of these proposals would benefit from further elaboration on how to pay for them, beyond taxing the wealthiest Americans. They would also depend on passage by Congress.

That means that, to enact her agenda, Mrs. Clinton would need to find common ground with a destabilized Republican Party, whose unifying goal in Congress would be to discredit her. Despite her political scars, she has shown an unusual capacity to reach across the aisle.

Her most lasting achievements as a senator include a federal fund for long-term health monitoring of 9/11 first responders, an expansion of military benefits to cover reservists and the National Guard, and a law requiring drug companies to improve the safety of their medications for children.

Below the radar, she fought for money for farmers, hospitals, small businesses and environmental projects. Her vote in favor of the Iraq war is a black mark, but to her credit, she has explained her thinking rather than trying to rewrite that history.

As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was charged with repairing American credibility after eight years of the Bush administration’s unilateralism. She bears a share of the responsibility for the Obama administration’s foreign-policy failings, notably in Libya. But her achievements are substantial.

She has evinced a lamentable penchant for secrecy and made a poor decision to rely on a private email server while at the State Department. That decision deserved scrutiny, and it’s had it. Now, considered alongside the real challenges that will occupy the next president, that email server, which has consumed so much of this campaign, looks like a matter for the help desk. And, viewed against those challenges, Mr. Trump shrinks to his true small-screen, reality-show proportions, as we’ll argue in detail on Monday.

Through war and recession, Americans born since 9/11 have had to grow up fast, and they deserve a grown-up president. A lifetime’s commitment to solving problems in the real world qualifies Hillary Clinton for this job, and the country should put her to work.

Russian Hackers' Cyber Attacks On New York Times

It increasingly seems that whoever or whatever institution is a perceived enemy of Donald Trump - i.e., anyone or any publication that doesn't only report glowing stories about the Donald - is becoming a target of Russian cyber hackers.   First it was the DNC, then Hillary Clinton's campaign, and now it is the New York Times which has been producing much needed exposure of Trump's seamy underbelly and unflattering coverage of Trump's perhaps house of cards real estate empire.  Indeed, Trump has invited Russian hackers to go after his political enemies.  The Washington Post looks at this unsettling cyber attack.  One can only wonder what's the next target or targets.  Here are story highlights:

Donald Trump insists he has "nothing to do with Russia" — but Russia's recent moves sure make it look as if it is trying to do something for him.

CNN reported Tuesday afternoon that hackers whom U.S. officials believe to be working for the Russian government have launched cyberattacks against the New York Times and other news outlets.

The Times followed up with a slightly different account Tuesday evening, reporting an attack on its Moscow bureau and adding that "there is no evidence that the hackers, believed to be Russian, were successful." The Times also reported that the FBI is investigating the attempted hack but is not looking into similar incidents involving other news agencies.

Trump has famously invited the Kremlin to go after emails that Hillary Clinton deleted, citing privacy.

"Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing," Trump said at a news conference last month.  But during the same event, he called the idea that he can tell Russian hackers where to aim "so far-fetched."

Still, it could be possible for Trump to influence the selection of targets without knowing it, especially if Russia would prefer to see him in the White House. Russian President Vladimir Putin has praised Trump as "a really brilliant and talented person," and Trump has lauded Putin as a "strong leader." Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul wrote in The Washington Post last week that "Putin not only has strong motives for wanting Trump to win over Clinton but also has some means to try to influence our presidential vote."

Cyberattacks are among the means, McFaul noted, pointing to the release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails shortly before the party's national convention. U.S. intelligence officials said they think Russia was behind the breach, which embarrassed Trump's political foes.

If Russian hackers were to take cues from Trump, media companies — and the New York Times, specifically — would surely be on the hit list. The business executive often rails against the "failing" New York Times and the "scum" in the media. He has vowed to "open up" libel laws, if elected, to make it easier to sue news organizations over negative coverage.  In short, Trump treats journalists as political opponents.

There is still plenty we don't know about this attempted media hack, but it is hardly a stretch to say that a candidate who would "love to have" the power to direct Russian hackers also would probably love to see them infiltrate the digital networks of the media companies he views as enemies. Journalists unsettled by his blacklisting of certain outlets, including The Post, and Trump's recent hiring of the lawyer who helped drive Gawker into bankruptcy certainly won't feel any more at ease now.

New York Times: Hillary for Democrat Party Nomination

With the Iowa caucuses tomorrow, the New York Times today released its endorsement for Democrat Party Nominee: Hillary Clinton.   The piece in part states "Voters have the chance to choose one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history."  Nowadays, I don't know if endorsements really carry much weight, but the piece does lay out a case for why Clinton is the better option for Democrats.  Yes, Sanders supporters will not be happy, but it is impossible to please everyone.  Here are editorial excerpts and readers can decide if they agree or not (share comments on the blog too):

For the past painful year, the Republican presidential contenders have been bombarding Americans with empty propaganda slogans and competing, bizarrely, to present themselves as the least experienced person for the most important elected job in the world. Democratic primary voters, on the other hand, after a substantive debate over real issues, have the chance to nominate one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.

Hillary Clinton would be the first woman nominated by a major party. She served as a senator from a major state (New York) and as secretary of state — not to mention her experience on the national stage as first lady with her brilliant and flawed husband, President Bill Clinton. The Times editorial board has endorsed her three times for federal office — twice for Senate and once in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary — and is doing so again with confidence and enthusiasm.

In the end, though, Mr. Sanders does not have the breadth of experience or policy ideas that Mrs. Clinton offers. His boldest proposals — to break up the banks and to start all over on health care reform with a Medicare-for-all system — have earned him support among alienated middle-class voters and young people. But his plans for achieving them aren’t realistic, while Mrs. Clinton has very good, and achievable, proposals in both areas.

Mrs. Clinton is a strong advocate of sensible and effective measures to combat the plague of firearms; Mr. Sanders’s record on guns is relatively weak. Her economic proposals for financial reform reflect a deep understanding of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform act, including the ways in which it has fallen short. She supports changes that the country badly needs, like controls on high-frequency trading and stronger curbs on bank speculation in derivatives.

One of the most attractive parts of Mrs. Clinton’s economic platform is her pledge to support the well-being and rights of working Americans. Her lifelong fight for women bolsters her credibility in this area, since so many of the problems with labor law hit women the hardest, including those involving child care, paid sick leave, unstable schedules and low wages for tipped workers.

Her knowledge comes from a commitment to issues like reproductive rights that is decades old. She was well ahead of Mr. Sanders in calling for repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which severely limits federal money to pay for abortions for poor women.

As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton worked tirelessly, and with important successes, for the nation’s benefit. She was the secretary President Obama needed and wanted: someone who knew leaders around the world, who brought star power as well as expertise to the table. 

Mrs. Clinton can be more hawkish on the use of military power than Mr. Obama, as shown by her current call for a no-fly zone in Syria and her earlier support for arming and training Syrian rebels. We are not convinced that a no-fly zone is the right approach in Syria, but we have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton would use American military power effectively and with infinitely more care and wisdom than any of the leading Republican contenders.

Mrs. Clinton has honed a steeliness that will serve her well in negotiating with a difficult Congress on critically important issues like climate change. It will also help her weather what are certain to be more attacks from Republicans and, should she win the White House, the possibility of the same ideological opposition and personal animus that President Obama has endured. 

Hillary Clinton is the right choice for the Democrats to present a vision for America that is radically different from the one that leading Republican candidates offer — a vision in which middle-class Americans have a real shot at prosperity, women’s rights are enhanced, undocumented immigrants are given a chance at legitimacy, international alliances are nurtured and the country is kept safe.

U.S. Intelligence Chief Debunks Anti-Hillary Claims

First the Benghazi hearings turned into a tour de force for Hillary Clinton at the expense of her Republican inquisitors.  Now, the office of the Director of National Intelligence  has reportedly concluded that two emails received by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not contain top secret information as her enemies - and members of the media perhaps more concerned with sensation than the truth - have claimed.  Media Maters looks at the development that proves more than a small embarrassment for the New York Times which had breathlessly floated the intial story.  Here are excerpts:

The office of the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has reportedly concluded that two emails received by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not contain top secret information, a reversal from the Intelligence Community inspector general's prior claim that they did, according to a Politico report. Media had previously used the notion that the two emails were highly classified to suggest that Clinton or her aides had engaged in criminal behavior.

In July, the New York Times published an article -- which it subsequently had to correct twice -- about a security referral the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (IG IC) made to the executive branch about whether there was any classified material on Clinton's email account during her time as secretary of state. The IG IC highlighted four allegedly classified emails and subsequently stated that two of those four emails contained "top secret" information. The State Department disagreed about whether the material in the emails was actually highly classified. As Politico is now reporting, "that disagreement has been resolved in State's favor" and the previous claim that the emails contained top secret information is wrong.

Politico reported on November 6 that the office of the Director of National Intelligence has now overruled the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community's prior conclusion that two emails received by Clinton contained highly classified information. As Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists explained to Politico, this "mistake" is nothing short than "astonishing" because "[i]t was a transformative event in the presidential campaign to this point. It had a potential to derail Clinton's presidential candidacy." From the article:

The U.S. intelligence community has retreated from claims that two emails in Hillary Clinton's private account contained top secret information, a source familiar with the situation told POLITICO.

The determination came from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's office and concluded that the two emails did not include highly classified intelligence secrets. Concerns about the emails' classification helped trigger an on-going FBI inquiry into Clinton's private email set-up.

More dashed hopes so far for the GOP.

New York Times Slams Rentboy Raid

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Is Hillary Clinton’s “Emailgate” a Fake Scandal

I will admit that I generally have a very low opinion of America's mainstream media, especially so called news outlets.  Reporters tend to be lazy and the sole emphasis is on sensation and grabbing headlines.  Real investigative reporting is increasingly rare and it's one reason why one finds the need to read British and other news outlets if one wants in depth  and/or investigative reporting.  Worse yet, time and time again the American media simply parrots what the GOP talking heads are spouting without challenging assertions that can easily be documented to be either untrue or deliberate lies.  A piece in Newsweek looks at the media's role in fanning "emailgate."  Here are highlights:

When it comes to the teapot tempest that is the Hillary Clinton email imbroglio, the real controversy isn’t about politics or regulations. It’s about journalism and the weak standards employed to manufacture the scandal du jour.

Because luminaries such as the public editor of The New York Times have dismissed critics of the emailgate coverage as rabid members on one side of a partisan divide—the pro-Hilary screamers versus the anti-Hillary frothers—I feel obligated to cut off that self-satisfied response up front: My opinion of Clinton is on par with my opinion of Jeb Bush. Neither is crazy, stupid or unelectable, which can’t be said about most other politicians stomping their way around Iowa these days. I’m not a Clinton supporter or opponent. I’m a Clinton agnostic.

Now let’s look at the real scandal—the one in journalism that’s been exposed by this whole episode.

There are two parts to emailgate: One, that Clinton used a personal email account when she served as Secretary of State, and the other, that neither she nor her aides preserved the emails. Break out the fainting couches and the smelling salts.

The first article about this episode (sorry, can’t even call it a scandal) appeared in The New York Times. . . . In what has to be one of the most snide journalistic defenses in a long time, Margaret Sullivan, the Times public editor, calls detractors of the piece as just Hilary supporters and dismisses most of the criticism by helpfully linking to the 2009 Federal Register, which lists an exceptionally technical series of regulations relating to the use and preservation of emails. She even cites a place to look, section 1236.22b. With all those numbers and letters, and the information coming out of a document as dull as the Federal Register, the story must be true, right?

In fact, the very rule that Sullivan cites contradicts the primary point of the Times story. For everyone except the two people who actually followed the link Sullivan posted, here is what the section actually says:

"Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."

Catch the problem? The regulation itself, through its opening words, “specifically designates that employees of certain agencies are allowed to use non-federal email systems.” And one of those agencies just happened to be…drumroll please.… The State Department. In other words, not only was the use of a personal email account not a violation of the rules, it was specifically allowed by the rules.

Secretary of State Colin Powell did the same thing. And, just a tidbit—so did every other Secretary of State up until the current one, John Kerry. Why? Because the rules changed in 2014, after Clinton left office, and now it’s required to use a federal system. If Kerry used a personal account, he would be violating a regulation. Clinton did not.

[L]et’s get to part two of emailgate—that the agencies are required to make sure emails from non-federal accounts are preserved. Here is what the Times article says about that: Clinton "may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Let’s dismantle this one part at a time. There is a term in journalism for the word may. It’s called a weasel word, which helps readers gloss over what the story is really saying: That the Times doesn’t know if the regulations were violated, but it sure sounds good to suggest that it could have been.

Then there is the part about how “Clinton and her aides failed” to preserve the records. Well, guess what? Under the very same regulation that Sullivan cites, it is not the responsibility of the email senders, recipients or their aides to make sure that the records are preserved. It is the responsibility of the State Department itself, which does so through technical analysis of all of the systems being used.
Every email that Clinton sent to any federal email account was preserved, automatically. And what kind of preservation systems existed in the server for Clinton’s personal emails that didn’t go into a federal server? Were they copied into the DoD–5015.2 STD-certified product (a lot of techno-speak which means a particular record-keeper)? Was there an automatic relay out of the server into a preservation system? Hell, my email account has that.  

The Times article makes it sound like Clinton just opened up a Gmail account and started sending emails without any consideration for the State Department techno-geeks responsible for following the rules and regulations,which, again, allowed for private email accounts to be used.

[A]s Clinton said on Tuesday, the server in question is the same one used by former President Bill Clinton and is located on private property, guarded by the Secret Service. 

The rest of the stories Sullivan links to show things such as Democrats reacting to the Times story and that Clinton’s daughter Chelsea had an email account on the same domain name. (Which is a truly bizarre point, since every employee at the State Department—down to the lowliest person on the rung of authority—would be using the same domain name as Clinton if she was on the federal system.)

The end question: Was security compromised? Was the process she used inappropriate or create any dangers? Or was it potentially safer, with more protections than exist in the federal system? I don’t know. But what’s sad here is, neither do the reporters who are huffing and puffing about this folderol. And aren’t journalists supposed to know if there is a scandal before declaring that one exists?

Remember  one thing: if the New York Times and other major outlets had done real reporting and challenged Bush/Cheney assertions, the entire Iraq War debacle might have been avoided.  Despite this reality, we some of the same players making the same lazy ass mistakes that were made back then.  Before you write stories about scandals, make sure one actually exists.