Der Trumpenführer to Sign Executive Order on Social Media Companies,

The day after Twitter felt compelled to attach a warning to some of Donald Trump's tweets containing gross falsehoods (to thereby prompt readers to fact-check Trump's claims), much like a (i) petulant self-absorbed child or (ii) banana  republic dictator, Donald Trump claims he will sign an executive order likely punishing social media companies that resist giving a platform for his lies and deliberately false propaganda.  Spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany (who is severely challenged herself when it comes to truth and veracity) confirmed Trump's intentions to reporters aboard Air Force One, traveling with Trump to Washington from Florida. Trump's threatened action confirms that he sees himself as a monarch accountable to no one.  In reality, questions remain as to what Trump can realistically do to get revenge on those who will not disseminate his lies.   CNN Business looks at the controversy:

Donald Trump threatened to "regulate" or even "close" down social media platforms in a series of tweets over the last day after Twitter added a fact-check label to some of his posts. But Trump's options for cracking down on Twitter and other platforms over how they moderate their platforms are somewhat limited, legal experts say.

The options at Trump's disposal could range from pushing for new legislation to pressuring US regulators to sue the companies, none of which are guaranteed to accomplish what the president is threatening to do. The most "obvious" course of action would be for Trump to seek changes to the Communications Decency Act, which shields tech platforms from legal liability for a wide range of online content, according to Andrew Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.
 There has been an ongoing push, led by the Justice Department and Republicans in Congress, to do just that. But changing the law would require building broad consensus in a deadlocked Congress. The Trump administration could not go it alone. And a new law that specifies how tech companies must police their platforms could raise questions about the law's constitutionality. 

Trump could pressure agencies such as the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission to take action against social media companies. But the agencies have previously resisted efforts by the White House to transform them into arbiters of political speech, with officials privately voicing opposition to a draft executive order that experts at the time said tested the limits of agency jurisdiction. The FCC regulates phone and broadband infrastructure, said Schwartzman, and lacks much jurisdiction over Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) in the first place. Schwartzman said one way Trump could seek to "harass" social media companies would be to pressure the FCC to deny those companies licenses for unrelated experiments involving satellite internet or wireless spectrum. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has considered establishing a White House commission to study allegations of conservative bias. But that only underscores the limits of Trump's direct influence on the matter.
 Despite the limitations, growing tensions with the White House could still be perceived as a threat to the companies. Twitter and Facebook saw their shares dip on Wednesday on a day when the overall market was up.

Others argue that Trump should be allowed to lie and show his true self, but that argument forgets that a wide swath of the public lacks the knowledge - dare I say, intelligence - recognize the level of the untruthfulness.  A column in the Washington Post makes the case of allowing Trump to hang himself.  Here are excerpts:

Timothy Klausutis is right: His late wife deserves better than a president who has cynically seized on the tragic circumstances of her death at 28 and “perverted it for perceived political gain.”

Basic human decency, a quality manifestly lacking in Trump, argues in favor of granting Klausutis’s request. Yet, while my heart aches for him and his family, I think that, on balance, deleting the tweets would be a mistake.

Twitter is both a private company and a powerful public platform. Once it assumes the role of deciding what speech by public officials is to be allowed and what is to be taken down, it has ventured onto the slipperiest of slopes. I’m not sure I want Dorsey or his team deciding what the public should and shouldn’t see from the elected president of the United States. Even this one.

[U]nder Twitter’s ordinary terms of service, the platform would not only remove the tweets but also perhaps even Trump himself; some people have advocated for just that. But the president, like any world leader — except more so, with his 80 million followers — is no ordinary tweeter. The argument over what to do about Trump on Twitter is a subset of the larger debate about how to treat his outbursts and falsehoods, in particular whether the media becomes complicit simply by presenting them to a wider public. Thus, stretching back to the 2016 campaign, there has been vigorous debate over whether and how to cover Trump’s misinformation- and venom-filled campaign rallies. [B]ut I would argue that shining sunlight on Trump’s idiocy is the best disinfectant. Let the public witness him in his full glory and make its own judgment about whether he deserves a second term. Combine that with real-time chyrons and commentary calling out his falsehoods.

That is what Twitter usefully and appropriately did Tuesday when it appended a fact check to another set of Trump tweets about the supposed dangers of voting by mail. Twitter should do the same with Trump’s tweets about Scarborough

The fundamental problem isn’t Twitter — it’s Trump. He shouldn’t be de-platformed, but he must be defeated.

The Nightmare in the White House

While the nation goes into lock down and the economy heads towards a collapse, the malignant narcissist in the White House does what he always does: lies nonstop and throws out boasts to inflate his insatiable ego.  When not lying outright, Trump attacks those in the media trying to get out the truth and accurate information and throws governors - including Republican governors who have previously prostituted themselves to Trump - to their own devices in protecting their citizens. Frank Rich has a column in New York Magazine looks at the ongoing lack of honesty and glaring failed leadership in the White House even as Trump sycophants try to change the subject from the failure of the Trump regime to prepare for the pandemic. Here are column excerpts:

As the coronavirus-related layoffs and medical needs pile up, experts are concluding that a strong federal response is needed. Is the Trump administration capable of rising to the occasion?

The president who is leading this country into battle cares about no one but himself, continues to lie to Americans daily about the most basic imperatives of a public-health catastrophe, and presides over an administration staffed with incompetent, third-tier bootlickers and grifters. And I am not just talking about Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and Wilbur Ross. There are now three college seniors serving in White House positions, thanks to a new purge of ostensibly disloyal staffers being conducted by Trump’s former body man, the 29-year-old John McEntee, recently installed as director of the Presidential Personnel Office. Trump calls himself a “wartime president,” but his only previous wartime experience was partying during Vietnam, when he was spared military service because of “bone spurs.” Those bone spurs long ago migrated to his brain. If America rises to the occasion, it will be despite him, not because of him. We’re at the point where even if Trump were to start telling the truth, no one except the most mad-dog MAGA-ites would believe him.

Right now the country is waiting for a bomb to drop: that much-predicted turning point when the metastasis of illness and mass death in the U.S. could match the curve we’ve seen in Italy. Trump’s nonstop lies — and those of toadies like Pence — are not just intended to cover up the many failures to prepare for the looming apocalypse (“I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic”), or to blame those failures on China and Obama, or to luxuriate in unearned self-congratulation (“I’d rate it a 10”). What the lies are doing now is throwing gasoline on the gathering fire.

Why does a president cite the Defense Protection Act, which allows him to commandeer industry to produce emergency supplies, while simultaneously telling the states to find much-needed ventilators on their own?

Trump’s answer to that last question was that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk.” He seemed not to understand that it’s ventilators that the nation’s hospitals urgently need, not the postal service. Such is his minimal comprehension of the urgent tasks at hand that Trump’s level of competence doesn’t rise to that of the skipper of the Titanic. The Titanic’s captain may have hit an iceberg, but at least he recognized the scientific reality that icebergs exist.

Up until now Trump’s motives for lying have been to (1) cover up what may prove the most catastrophic failure in the history of the American presidency; (2) to distract the country from the continuing failure in the effort to keep his reelection campaign afloat; (3) to boost the stock market. But another motive is emerging that’s entirely in keeping with the history to date of Trump’s kleptocratic White House: rewarding his family and cronies financially.

Based on his [Jared Kushner] and his father-in-law’s past behavior, we have every reason to believe that entrepreneurs in the Mar-a-Lago circuit, assuming they are not killed off by the virus, will benefit from any bailouts crafted by the White House and Republicans in Congress, starting perhaps with casino entrepreneurs like Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn.

This is in keeping with a president who remains passive as athletes and celebrities mysteriously cut the long line to be tested for the coronavirus. It is in keeping with a Vichy Republican Party where the senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler were dumping stocks pre-crash, seemingly exploiting inside information about the coming fiasco for huge personal profit while keeping their own voters in the dark about it. Today Tucker Carlson is receiving some applause for being a rare truth-teller on Fox News because last night he called out Burr in no uncertain terms: “There is no greater moral crime than betraying your country in a time of crisis.”

By now, a number of promises Donald Trump has made directly to the press — universal access to testing, a nationwide medical-screening website, the deployment of hospital ships — have failed to pan out after initially receiving breathless headlines. Should the press change the way it covers Trump’s promises?

The challenge to the press remains what it’s been from the start: How do you challenge a lying president on the facts in real time when he is lying as fast as he can speak? The difference now is that more than ever lives are dependent on Americans getting the truth.

Change is needed, and it will require collaboration of the best brains in the news business to reinvent practices and formats. Even hours after Trump had floated bogus miracle drugs before the public yesterday, at least one network evening news broadcast was teasing the story with a hopeful headline before disemboweling it.

Quotes of the Day: Andrew Sullivan Live Blogging

Watching the presidential debate is painful in many ways, not the least of which is Donald Trump's lies and Texas sized bull shit.  Sadly, Trump's supporters are as delusional as he is and as immune from being tethered to objective reality as The Donald himself.   Andrew Sullivan is live blogging the debates and here are some reflections.  Here is a sampling:

9:50 p.m. What he has just said in a presidential debate is indistinguishable from what a drunk at a bar might say before he is thrown out. It’s incredible to me that this ranting, incoherent bigot is actually a nominee of a major party in the U.S.

9:47 p.m. Trump’s response to the racial divide question is simply to tout his endorsement from the police union. Then he pivots to the notion that inner city violence is caused by illegal immigrants. His answer on stop and frisk is an argument against the constitution. He has contempt for the Constitution because it might actually impede him from doing what he wants.

 

9:43 p.m. It’s clear that Trump has no idea what a debate is and has never actually debated an equal. He rants and then shouts over and interrupts his debate partner. This is the performance of a tyrant – someone utterly unsuited to the give and take and reasoned debate that’s integral – essential– to a liberal democracy.

9:42 p.m. I have to say that Clinton’s spiel on Trump’s foul business record was effective. And what’s up with his nose? Why is he constantly sniffing?

9:40 p.m. A little fact-checking:

 Follow

Donald J. Trump 

✔@realDonaldTrump

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

2:15 PM - 6 Nov 2012

 

9:30 p.m. He’s now full bonkers – attacking the Federal Reserve. And then repeating the absurd lie that he cannot release his tax returns because of an audit. He’s just doubling down on the bullshit. If this performance works, it’s the end of any kind of rational discourse in a liberal democracy.

9:16 p.m. Clinton is doing far better than I anticipated. And he’s flailing – and gives us the first interruption.

9:12 p.m. A terrific response from Clinton on “trumped-up trickle down economics.” And her attempt to contrast her more modest upbringing with Trump’s astonishing privilege. Trump is responding with slogans. And suddenly it’s not “Crooked Hillary”, it’s Secretary Clinton. So he switches tactics and plays his strong card – that he is the new thing and Clinton has been around for ever.

He has no answer on how to bring manufacturing jobs back.

Why Debate Moderators Must Fact Check Candidates

As numerous prior posts have argued, a major role of the mainstream media is to not only report the news but also to expose outright lies and deceit.  Despite this critical role of the media, the head of the Commission on Presidential Debates has stated that he thinks that presidential moderators shouldn't try to fact-check the candidates.  Stated another way, he advocates for candidates to being free to live without any restraint.  In my view, the man needs to be fired and replaced with someone who doesn't have his head up his ass.   A piece in the Washington Post looks at this issue  and the idiocy of not fact checking candidates when confronted with a pathological liar like Donald Trump. Here are highlights:

There are hard questions in life. . . . . What isn't hard, though, is what the unemployment rate is. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the answer to that every month.

Despite that, the head of the Commission on Presidential Debates thinks that this is the kind of issue that moderators shouldn't try to fact-check the candidates on. "If you and I have different sources of information," she asked CNN's Brian Stelter, "does your source about the unemployment rate agree with my source?"

The problem is, of course, that there aren't different sources of information about the unemployment rate any more than there are different sources of information about what two plus two equals. There's the BLS, and then there are conspiracy theorists. But that's a lot different from saying, as Trump does, that the unemployment rate is "really" 23 percent or 42 percent or another made-up number. Even the broadest possible definition of under- and unemployment — people who can't find work, people who have given up looking for work, people who "should" be working but for whatever reason aren't, and people who can only find part-time work — wouldn't even be half as much as what Trump is saying. The fact — there's that word again — is that Donald Trump has a penchant for saying things that are false. He's lied about opposing the Iraq War from the beginning, suggested that vaccines cause autism, said that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, claimed that "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey were cheering on 9/11, insinuated that Ted Cruz's father had something to do with the JFK assassination, and, of course,questioned whether President Obama was really born in the United States — continuing to do so even after Obama released his birth certificate. It isn't partisan to point out that none of these are true. Nor is it to say that the unemployment rate isn't worse than it was during the Great Depression. 

Letting untruths go unchallenged is, though. It's implicitly taking sides against reality.

Fact Checking GOP Lies on the Iran Deal

Whether it was out of a desire to play to the open racism of the GOP base as embodied in opposition to everything Obama, to delight the Christofascists who see war with Iran with near orgasms at the thought of killing Muslims, or pandering to the defense industry and companies like Halliburton who are profiteers in wartime, the GOP carnival barkers candidates could not say enough bad things about the Iran nuclear deal last night.  Whether or not what they said was true or in touch with reality, of course, did not matter given the primary voter audience that was the real target of last night circus.  A piece in Slate fact checks the GOP claims - something that will never happen on Fox News, a/k/a Faux News.  Here are article excerpts:

Not surprisingly, the recently negotiated nuclear agreement with Iran was a major topic of conversation at Wednesday’s GOP debates, but a lot of specifics appeared to get lost in the back-and-forth among the candidates. So who was stretching the truth, getting things right, and making stuff up? Here’s some context for the claims made on the stage at the Reagan Library.

Ted Cruz:

This deal will spend $100 billion, making the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism.

The U.S. isn’t spending $100 billion on anything. According to the Treasury Department, Iran will recover roughly $100 billion of its own money that has been piling up in international banks due to sanctions. Once the International Atomic Energy Agency verifies Iran is complying with the deal, it will be able to access that money.

Claims that the deal will accelerate or slow Iran’s nuclear program are unprovable, but for what it’s worth, quite a few prominent scientists and former military officers think it’s the best way to prevent an Iranian bomb. 

John Kasich:

If they cheat, we slap the sanctions back on. If they help Hamas, we slap sanctions on, and if we find out they may be developing a nuclear weapon, the option is on the table.

Kasich suggested in his answer that while he believes in the utility of negotiating with hostile foreign governments and would keep the deal, he doesn’t like it, though it’s not entirely clear why. Kasich’s pledges to reimpose sanctions if necessary sound a bit like the “snapback” mechanism included in the deal, which would allow U.N. sanctions to be reapplied, without a vote by the Security Council, if Iran is found to be cheating. The reference to Hamas is misleading, as the deal doesn’t lift sanctions on Iran related to its support for terrorist groups and, as GOP critics have frequently pointed out, doesn’t require Iran to cease that support.

Scott Walker:

This president allowed Iran to get closer and closer. I would love to play cards with this guy because Barack Obama folds with everything on Iran.

If Walker means that Iran is getting “closer and closer” to acquiring a nuclear weapon, that contradicts the IAEA, which has stated that Iran is complying with the interim deal negotiated in 2013 and has halted much of its enrichment activity.

Jeb Bush:

We need to re-establish our commitment to Israel, which is tattered and we make sure they have the most sophisticated weapons to send a signal to Iran that we have Israel's back.

The government-to-government political relationship has undoubtedly gotten rockier under Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu, but U.S. aid to Israel has continued to increase and will amount to $3.1 billion this year.

Mike Huckabee:

To give them this agreement, that the president treats like the Magna Carta but Iranians treat like toilet paper and we must simply make it very clear that the next president, one of us on this stage, will absolutely not honor that agreement and will destroy it and will be tough with Iran because otherwise, we put every person in this world in a very dangerous place. 

This is mostly a matter of opinion, but it’s hard to see how tearing up a deal would make Iran less likely to try to develop a nuclear weapon.

Donald Trump:

I've never seen anything like it. One of the worst contracts I've seen.

Really? Worse than Trump University?

Not surprisingly, none of the GOP candidates said a word about the largest financier of Islamic terrorism: Saudi Arabia. 

Is the Main Stream Media a GOP Tool?

One hears constant charges from the far right and Republican side of the isle about the "liberal media" not providing "balanced" coverage.   I would counter that, if anything, the media is too deferential to the Republican Party - much as it gives deference to religious extremists and religion in general - and all too often merely parrots whatever bullshit the GOP is peddling while never fact checking any of it. One only need to recall the lead up to the Iraq War which was based on deliberate Bush/Cheney lies to remember but one example of this frightening failure.   The media bears a huge responsibility in keeping politicians honest, but the same standard needs to be applied to the GOP as Hillary Clinton.  A piece in The Week looks at the media's responsibility.  Here are excerpts:

You can't understand Hillary Clinton's perspective without understanding what happened in the 1990s, and the media transformation that was going on while Bill Clinton was president. From the first moments of that presidency, Clinton's opponents were convinced he was corrupt to the core. They assumed that if they mounted enough investigations and tossed around enough charges, something would stick and Clinton would be brought down. If you think the endless Benghazi investigations are ridiculous, you should have been around then . . .

Conservative talk radio came into its own in the 1990s, providing Republicans both an outlet for their most outrageous charges and a goad to produce more of them. (When they won control of Congress in 1994, Republicans literally made Rush Limbaugh an honorary member of their freshman class). Fox News debuted in 1996, in time for the impeachment crisis of 1998. The previously leisurely news cycle accelerated rapidly, and nothing fed it like scandal.

While the Clintons bear responsibility for getting many of those scandals going with questionable decision-making or behavior, it's also true that the mainstream media made huge mistakes during that period by treating every Republican charge, no matter how ludicrous, as though it was worthy of a full-scale investigation splashed across the front page. Again and again, they reacted to the most thinly justified accusations as though the next Watergate or Iran-Contra was at hand, and when it turned out that there was no corruption or illegality to be found, they simply moved on to the next faux-scandal, presented no less breathlessly.

That past — and journalists' failures to reckon with it — are still affecting coverage today. When this email story broke, how many journalists said it was important because it "plays into a narrative" of Hillary Clinton as scandal-tainted? I must have heard it a dozen times just in the past week.

Here's a tip for my fellow scribes and opinionators: If you find yourself justifying blanket coverage of an issue because it "plays into a narrative," stop right there. That's a way of saying that you can't come up with an actual, substantive reason this is important or newsworthy . . . during the Clinton years, reporters would say they had no choice but to devote attention to some scurrilous charge, whether there was evidence for it or not, because someone had made the charge and therefore it was "out there."

They should apply similar standards to all the candidates; if it's important that Clinton used a private email account while at State, then it must be equally important that other candidates have used private emails for work, and they should be subject to as much scrutiny as she is. When a new revelation or accusation emerges, the questions reporters should ask themselves include: Is there evidence for this? What's the context in which it took place? How does it bear on the presidency?

"Does this play into a narrative?" ought to be the last question they ask. As I wrote about Hillary Clinton, there are ways in which she owes her supporters better than what they've gotten from her in the past. But that's only half the story. The news media owes their readers, listeners, and viewers better than what they got, too.

Account of Gang Rape on University of Virginia Campus Comes Under Scrutiny

I've tried to keep an open mind about the claims put forth by a Rolling Stone article last month which, if believed, makes the University of Virginia look like a safe haven for rapists and misogynists.  The University of Virginia has understandably cried foul and now, journalists are beginning to question the account and quality of reporting done by the articles author who seemed to only want to hear things that furthered her agenda of writing a sensational story.  The New York Times looks at the rising scrutiny the story and reporter are facing.  Here are excerpts:

An article in Rolling Stone magazine about an alleged gang rape on the campus of the University of Virginia has come under scrutiny for its reporting methods, even as the university and the local police investigate the events the article described.

After the article’s publication last month, the case was handed to the Charlottesville, Va., police; the university vowed to update its policies; and the fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, suspended its operations.

But some have also raised questions about the article. Its writer, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, has faced criticism because she has acknowledged in interviews that she did not contact or interview the men accused of the rape. News organizations, seeking to be fair, usually seek comment from those suspected of criminal conduct.  In an interview Tuesday, Ms. Erdely said that she stood by her reporting.

[S]ome journalists have raised questions about the story. Richard Bradley, who as an editor at George magazine was duped by the former New Republic writer and fabulist Stephen Glass, said in an essay that he had since learned to be skeptical of articles that confirm existing public narratives. “This story contains a lot of apocryphal tropes,” he wrote. Others, including Jonah Goldberg, a Los Angeles Times columnist, compared the case to rape accusations in 2006 against three lacrosse players at Duke University who were subsequently cleared and speculated that the Virginia story might be a hoax.

News media critics questioned the article’s reliance on a single source. “For the sake of Rolling Stone’s reputation,” said Erik Wemple, The Washington Post’s media critic, “Sabrina Rubin Erdely had better be the country’s greatest judge of character.”

Further details of the episode, beyond what was in the article, have not yet emerged, and the man accused of orchestrating the alleged assault has not been publicly identified. The identities of the other men accused of the rape were not known to Rolling Stone, beyond nicknames, and it is not clear whether they are known to the authorities.

A piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch also steps into the controversy and cites a troubling mindset:

An interesting meme is beginning to evolve around the Rolling Stone story. Here and there, mainly on social media, we’re beginning to read that it doesn’t really matter if the story’s completely true, that it has revealed a culture among elite fraternities that not only accepts but celebrates the sexual abuse of women. The story has, therefore, performed an invaluable public service. Furthermore, those who question the details of the story give cover to an unforgivable culture of rape. This is journalism as fable, as purveyor of morality tales designed to reveal large truths. Small facts are for small minds, or worse.

It is certainly true that sexual abuse in colleges and elsewhere merits serious attention, analysis and correction. It’s a problem with many sources and few simple solutions. So what better than a clarifying narrative of monsters loose at an elite university, preying on innocent freshmen women? It happens. But is the rape at Phi Psi in 2012 real? Did it happen? Oddly, those in positions of authority seem afraid to even ask, at least publicly. They’re too busy reacting.

Allegations are easy to make and more than one individual's story line should be consulted before attacking an institution or individuals.  The Duke University hoax does demonstrate how easy it is to provide lies to only too willing journalists.  I'd also note that if there is a culture in American society that sees women as objects, let's place the blame where it belongs:  Macho males indoctrinated in the belief that women are subordinate to men and/or willing temptresses.  Where do they get such indoctrination?  From their churches.