Tag: nyt

Listen to Atrios

“That reporters are not willing to deal appropriately with regular lies and liars is not a new thing, but I do think what is new with the Trump administration is that they lie about everything. There is no interest in in attempting to lie plausibly, or even to stick to the truth when that would serve them just as well. […]

You can’t report on this administration by fronting the lies and having the rebuttal 3 paragraphs – or 3 days – later. That they lie constantly has to frame all coverage of them. Nothing is the truth.”

Duncan Black, writing for Eschaton

70 point “Yep” in the print edition of Lemkin. Media doing their job won’t fix our Current Situation, but they can help by being, oh, 97% less credulous of the daily spew. Especially when they know it’s a bald faced lie. Push back. Early and often.

It’s the Leaks

Perhaps we can get ahead of the “forget the impact of overturning Roe, it’s the leaking of the draft decision that matters” nonsense like this:

The release of the 98-page document is unprecedented in the court’s modern history: Early drafts of opinions have virtually never leaked before the final decision is announced, and never in such a consequential case. And early drafts of opinions often change by the time the decision from the court is announced.

Michael D. Shear and Adam Liptak writing in the Times of New York

if we actually bother to point out that this characterization is categorically false. Thirty seconds of Googling would net you this highly relevant bit of information that the Post somehow managed to find and print:

…it is not true that rulings have never been given to journalists before the announcement of the decision by the court. In fact, the result in Roe v. Wade itself was leaked by a Supreme Court clerk to a Time magazine reporter in January 1973. The issue of Time, with an article titled “The Sexes: Abortion on Demand,” appeared on newsstands hours before the decision was announced by Justice Harry Blackmun.

James B. Robenalt, Washington Post

We knew this decision was coming and we know that birth control is next. Codifying into law national bans on both would be planks in the GOP platform if they bothered with such documents anymore. This almost makes one think there’s a reason they don’t put out platforms anymore.

As it stands, the GOP is out there every day messaging against Griswold as being of a piece with Roe in the “wrongly decided” department of GOP jurisprudence i.e. “privacy for me but not for thee.” With a functioning Democrat party you might be able to message against that because, last time I checked, access to birth control both in and out of marriage is a pretty popular thing. Access to “safe, legal, and rare” style of regulated abortion is also a 70/30 “for” proposition. But our Establishment Democrat is still not sure they should do anything about being characterized daily as part of an organized pedophilia cult that likely drinks baby blood. This is why they fail.

[…] when he found out that I, you know, that there may be tapes out there whether it’s governmental tapes or anything else and who knows, I think his story may have changed.

Donald Trump, openly admitting to witness tampering through his comments on the possibility of taped conversations with Comey. This is fine. Nothing to see here.

So why do Republicans hate Obamacare so much? It’s not because they have better ideas; as we’ve seen over the past few weeks, they’re coming up empty-handed on the “replace” part of “repeal and replace.” It’s not, I’m sorry to say, because they are deeply committed to Americans’ right to buy the insurance policy of their choice.

No, mainly they hate Obamacare for two reasons: It demonstrates that the government can make people’s lives better, and it’s paid for in large part with taxes on the wealthy. Their overriding goal is to make those taxes go away. And if getting those taxes cut means that quite a few people end up dying, remember: freedom!

Paul Krugman, writing in the Times of New York. I’d only quibble with the “over the past few weeks, they’re coming up empty handed” part. The GOP has had YEARS to come up with a plan. They haven’t. In fact, they haven’t even produced so much as a meaningful tweak, much less full replacment. Their plan is that anyone who can’t pay or exhausts their tax sheltered Health Savings Account should kindly go die in the streets. Period. Just how big should that HSA get? I guess that depends on how sick you plan on being or the level to which you are prepared to shop around during your heart attack.

The 25th Amendment

Just one excerpt from today’s Trump press conference, presented without editing and straight up from the Times of New York transcript of the event:

QUESTION: (inaudible) …for those who believe that there is something to it, is there anything that you have learned over the last few weeks that you might be able to reveal that might ease their concerns that this isn’t fake news? And second…

TRUMP: …I think they don’t believe it. I don’t think the public – that’s why the Rasmussen poll just has me through the roof. I don’t think they believe it. Well, I guess one of the reasons I’m here today is to tell you the whole Russian thing, that’s a ruse. That’s a ruse. And by the way, it would be great if we could get along with Russia, just so you understand that.

“Now tomorrow, you’ll say “Donald Trump wants to get along with Russia, this is terrible.” It’s not terrible. It’s good. We had Hillary Clinton try and do a reset. We had Hillary Clinton give Russia 20 percent of the uranium in our country. You know what uranium is, right? This thing called nuclear weapons like lots of things are done with uranium including some bad things.

"Nobody talks about that. I didn’t do anything for Russia. I’ve done nothing for Russia. Hillary Clinton gave them 20 percent of our uranium. Hillary Clinton did a reset, remember? With the stupid plastic button that made us all look like a bunch of jerks. Here, take a look. He looked at her like, what the hell is she doing with that cheap plastic button?

"Hillary Clinton – that was the reset, remember it said reset? Now if I do that, oh, I’m a bad guy. If we could get along with Russia, that’s a positive thing. We have a very talented man, Rex Tillerson, who’s going to be meeting with them shortly and I told him. I said “I know politically it’s probably not good for me.” The greatest thing I could do is shoot that ship that’s 30 miles off shore right out of the water.

"Everyone in this country’s going to say “oh, it’s so great.” That’s not great. That’s not great. I would love to be able to get along with Russia. Now, you’ve had a lot of presidents that haven’t taken that tack. Look where we are now. Look where we are now. So, if I can – now, I love to negotiate things, I do it really well, and all that stuff. But – but it’s possible I won’t be able to get along with Putin.

"Maybe it is. But I want to just tell you, the false reporting by the media, by you people, the false, horrible, fake reporting makes it much harder to make a deal with Russia. And probably Putin said “you know.” He’s sitting behind his desk and he’s saying “you know, I see what’s going on in the United States, I follow it closely. It’s going to be impossible for President Trump to ever get along with Russia because of all the pressure he’s got with this fake story.” OK?

"And that’s a shame because if we could get along with Russia – and by the way, China and Japan and everyone. If we could get along, it would be a positive thing, not a negative thing.

Forget it, Donny, you’re out of your element!

Donald Trump: When I am President, Russia will respect us far more than they do now.
New York Times: In a move that U.S. officials say violates a major 1987 arms-control treaty, Russia has secretly deployed a cruise missile […] violating the 1987 treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. Signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the treaty bans missiles that can fly between 300 and 3,400 miles.

We’re going to get reimbursed, but I don’t want to wait that long. But you start, and then you get reimbursed.

Incoming President Donald Trump. I hope he has the right TPS reports forms for that, because I hear the Mexican government can be sticklers on reciepts, the TPS reports, the cover sheets, and their formatting.

Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump

I’ve never seen a lede buried by putting the entire text of the story inside of it. But this reunited nut is precisely why Trump resonates and the rest of the GOP’s favored class can’t lay a hand on him:

The scenario Karl Rove outlined was bleak.

Addressing a luncheon of Republican governors and donors in Washington on Feb. 19, he warned that Donald J. Trump’s increasingly likely nomination would be catastrophic, dooming the party in November. But Mr. Rove, the master strategist of George W. Bush’s campaigns, insisted it was not too late for them to stop Mr. Trump, according to three people present.

At a meeting of Republican governors the next morning, Paul R. LePage of Maine called for action. Seated at a long boardroom table at the Willard Hotel, he erupted in frustration over the state of the 2016 race, saying Mr. Trump’s nomination would deeply wound the Republican Party. Mr. LePage urged the governors to draft an open letter “to the people,” disavowing Mr. Trump and his divisive brand of politics. The suggestion was not taken up. Since then, Mr. Trump has only gotten stronger, winning two more state contests […entire rest of story…]

On Friday, a few hours after Mr. Christie endorsed him, Mr. Trump collected support from a second governor, who in a radio interview said Mr. Trump could be “one of the greatest presidents.”

That governor was Paul LePage.

The jig is up, fellas. Literally everyone, even your studiously misled base that you’ve cultivated for decades, is intimitely familiar with your game, knows it on sight, and unless and until you set it aside, Trump will continue to rule your world.

Inside the Republican Party’s Desperate Mission to Stop Donald Trump

This is how The End begins

So, at least now we know how it all ends for Microsoft:

SEATTLE — In the biggest shuffling of Microsoft’s executive ranks since the company’s new chief executive, Satya Nadella, took over, Mark Penn, the former aide to the Clinton family, is becoming the company’s chief strategy officer.

The change will give Mr. Penn, who has been an executive vice president at Microsoft overseeing advertising and strategy, a bigger hand in determining which markets Microsoft should be in and where it should be making further investments

Inexplicable. He’ll have that company destroyed inside of a month. Well, more destroyed.

This is how The End begins