June 30, 2020

Is Trump's tepid response to the covid-19 outbreak because he's profiting off of the # of deaths?

June 29, 2020

Two great movies for our current world...

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7349662/


https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1598778/

June 24, 2020

Trump campaign names Hogan Gidley as new press secretary

The Trump campaign has named Hogan Gidley as its new press secretary, replacing Kayleigh McEnany, who became the White House press secretary in April. Gidley is currently the principal deputy press secretary at the White House.

"Hogan Gidley has been at the President's side for three years and now he joins the fight to re-elect him," campaign manager Brad Parscale said in a statement. "He is a talented advocate and defender of the President and his policies and is never afraid to go into battle with hostile reporters and television hosts. Hogan is a great addition to the team and makes us even stronger."

President Trump on Tuesday tweeted praise of Gidley, calling him a "strong, loyal and trusted member of the team." Mr. Trump said Gidley would be leaving the White House on July 1. Prior to working at the White House, Gidley was a Republican consultant and served as a contributor to CBS News.

Gidley's move to the campaign was announced after the president held his first campaign rally since March in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Saturday. The rally had a lower than expected attendance.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-campaign-names-hogan-gidley-as-new-press-secretary/

June 23, 2020

"Enjoy the Killing" says a man that trains cops all over the US

"Enjoy the Killing", DO NOT RESIST, deleted scene, 2015

http://www.donotresistfilm.com/
https://sports.yahoo.com/george-floyd-death-in-custody-puts-spotlight-on-warrior-training-for-police-195640810.html

June 17, 2020

A podcast about the tv show "Cops" that is a must hear...

https://www.topic.com/runningfromcops

Dan Taberski talked to The Business last year about his podcast, “Running from Cops” — about the long-running and money-minting reality show.

He and a team of six screeners watched and catalogued more that 800 episodes of “Cops” and set out to interview anyone involved in the show — police officers, camera operators, producers, and most crucially, people who had appeared as suspects on the show.

In his podcast series, Taberski found several troubling things about “Cops.” Police departments often got final say in what viewers did and didn’t see. And people who appeared on “Cops” told Taberski their lives were much the worse for it, and that they never were asked to sign releases.

Above all, the show presented bad police tactics, like using faulty field drug tests, as effective.

Now, Taberski is back to talk about the end of “Cops” and the impact of it’s very successful alter ego, “Live PD.”

On June 9, following weeks of protests against police misconduct, the Paramount Network canceled “Cops.” The next day, A&E dropped “Live PD,” its highest rated series. Note: When we talked to Taberski, that last development with “Live PD” had not yet happened.

https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/the-business/police-tv-cops-cancellation-live-pd/dan-taberski-running-from-cops-live-pd

June 15, 2020

Newsrooms Are in Revolt. The Bosses Are in Their Country Houses.

Those who can afford it left the city, shining a spotlight on class divisions in the media.



EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Real estate out here is too expensive for a working person, so the East Hampton Golf Club usually provides shared houses for its caddies. But Covid-19 means no boardinghouses, and no boarding means no caddies, and no caddies means that the media moguls who pay more than $400,000 to join (putting it in the middle range for initiation fees in the Hamptons) now must pull their own clubs around, which they’ve been telling one another reminds them of their youth, and which is just the kind of sacrifice that the coronavirus has brought to East Hampton.

That’s not all. The parties and attendant deals are off, and executives face a summer without tiki-torch-lit pathways leading to raw bar spreads on the beach, catered for tens of thousands of dollars for a few dozen friends. Parents are growing desperate: “With no camps being open, they’re looking for things to do,” said Boomer Jousma, a yacht broker, who has met that need by selling twice as many yachts as usual, including four of the $1 million-plus Vanquish brand in the last two weeks.

There’s also not so much Instagram. Everyone saw what happened when their neighbor, David Geffen, who paid $70 million for his spread on Lily Pond Lane in 2016, posted a picture of a sunset over his $590 million superyacht in late March and shared that he was “isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus,” provoking a wave of public shaming. Out here, they’re being careful to avoid both the disease and the anger seething out of New York City, where much of the working media is both exhausted from covering the story of their lives and in open revolt.

<snip>

Underlying much of this tension is a sense — in media as in the rest of American society — of just how deep the gaps can be. I felt that sting last week when I saw a tweet from Amber Jamieson raging about rich New Yorkers who fled the coronavirus, leaving behind spacious houses and apartments that would have made for a relatively easy quarantine. “Genuinely hope they feel deep shame their whole lives,” she wrote.

I was Ms. Jamieson’s editor at BuzzFeed News until earlier this year, and I couldn’t help thinking this was about me, since I headed up to Columbia County, N.Y., in early March, and so I called Ms. Jamieson, 34, an Australian native who lives in a studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, to ask her what she meant.

“The biggest story in the world came to your front door and you left — that to me is insane,” she said, adding that her experience — the woman who works the front desk of her gym died, and she wrote about a funeral procession for another neighbor — has been essential to her reporting. “You left for your own personal safety and because it made you stressed and anxious.”

She paused.

“I feel bad that I feel like everybody should feel absolutely self-loathing and shame,” she said.

I asked Ms. Jamieson if what she was feeling was rooted in a desire for justice, or for better journalism, or just free-floating, Australian-inflected rage.

“All of those things,” she said.

Nothing personal, of course. Ms. Jamieson has reporter friends who left a small apartment for a place in Aspen; she understands that people have children, parents, health conditions. “They wanted more space for their kids, or to care for an elderly relative, OK, everyone has a reason,” she said. But she thinks that the bosses, and journalists, have a special obligation to stay: “Being a leader means staying with your people and seeing what they see.”

But Ms. Jamieson said it had been an eye-opening experience.

“It revealed the money in journalism — who has cash and who doesn’t and how much this industry is from people with trust funds or well-connected parents and they could stay in the Hamptons or the Catskills,” she said. (On that note, I should disclose again that I don’t extensively cover BuzzFeed, which I left in February, in this column because I have yet to divest my stock options in the company, as required by The Times.)

more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/business/media/media-executives-hamptons.html

best comment in response:
https://nyti.ms/3fuMQWK#permid=107606522

Media bosses' and news readers' extreme wealth goes a long way to explain the infuriating obsession with propping up the status quo. This system benefits them and that is why, while their front-line people are being harassed and assaulted at Trump rallies and beaten by police, they push the both-sides narrative with such vigor and always have. Truth and facts have taken a back seat to "balance" for years. Judith Miller ring any bells? There is not a left/right bias in media. It is a bias in favor of the oligarchs at all costs and that is because the oligarchs run the media. This article confirms the suspicions of most people who have been paying attention.

June 15, 2020

How the GOP brought antisemitism from the margins to the White House

How the GOP brought antisemitism from the margins to the White House

A new website tracking incidents of right-wing antisemitism finds that rarely a week goes by without the Republican Party boosting white nationalism.

By
Natasha Roth-Rowland
June 15, 2020

On March 25, 2019, Republican Representative Mo Brooks took to the floor of Congress and read aloud a passage from “Mein Kampf.” Brooks, who represents Alabama’s 5th District, claimed that by initiating impeachment proceedings against Trump, the Democrats were perpetrating the “Big Lie” — a propaganda technique Hitler accused German Jews of using, which involves creating a fiction so massive no one could believe it was an invention. Throughout his speech, Brooks repeatedly referred to Hitler and the Nazi party as “socialists” in an effort to imply political proximity to the Democrats.

A few days later, Donald Trump, Jr. gave an interview to TruNews, a far-right racist website that most recently drew attention for referring to Trump’s impeachment as a “Jew Coup.” Just over a week later, on April 6, President Trump told an audience at a Republican Jewish event that Benjamin Netanyahu was their prime minister, invoking the antisemitic “dual loyalty” trope, which holds that Jews are more loyal to the Jewish community worldwide (or, more recently, to Israel) than they are to their own countries.

As much as observers were shocked by these incidents, this was a fairly typical fortnight in contemporary U.S. politics. As a new website, How to Fight Antisemitism, shows, rarely a week goes by without the GOP engaging in antisemitic rhetoric or actions, or enabling the wider ecosystem of white nationalism it has emboldened in recent years.

https://www.972mag.com/gop-antisemitism-white-nationalism/

June 13, 2020

Quite possibly the most hilariously awful speech ever!

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1271814819507834881

How the grads didn't fall over laughing...

June 12, 2020

A political cartoon from Morten Morland

https://twitter.com/mortenmorland/status/1269530884350316545

June 8, 2020

Philly burned this week; just across the river Camden did not.

NYTs Kate Zernike story on Camden, two years after it dismantled its police force and started over.

https://twitter.com/kzernike/status/1269759886130319360

Camden Turns Around With New Police Force

CAMDEN, N.J. — In the summer of 2012, the year this city broke its own record for homicides, there were 21 people murdered here. This summer, there were six.

Just as remarkably, with shootings down 43 percent in two years, and violent crime down 22 percent, Osvaldo Fernandez now lets his sons walk to school alone. Nancy Torres abandoned plans to move to Florida. And parents from Center City Philadelphia are bringing their children here — notoriously one of the nation’s poorest, most crime-ridden cities — to play in a Little League that has grown to 500 players from 150 in its first season three years ago.

It has been 16 months since Camden took the unusual step of eliminating its police force and replacing it with a new one run by the county. Beleaguered by crime, budget cuts and bad morale, the old force had all but given up responding to some types of crimes.

Dispensing with expensive work rules, the new force hired more officers within the same budget — 411, up from about 250. It hired civilians to use crime-fighting technology it had never had the staff for. And it has tightened alliances with federal agencies to remove one of the largest drug rings from city streets.

<snip>

No one, least of all law-enforcement officials, is declaring victory on crime: Camden has seen too many promises and rescue packages to be so bold.

Still, the improvements have come faster than anyone predicted. And while the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., has drawn attention to long-simmering hostilities between police departments and minority communities, Camden is becoming an example of the opposite.

“We’re not going to do this by militarizing streets,” Chief Thomson said. Instead, he sent officers to knock on doors and ask residents their concerns. He lets community leaders monitor surveillance cameras from their home computers to help watch for developing crime.

The police have held meet-the-officer fairs at parks and churches, attended baseball games and sent Mister Softee trucks into neighborhoods. Officers stand at school crossings and on corners where drugs and violence flourished. Chief Thomson’s theory is that in a city of 77,000, there are thousands more well-intentioned people than bad, and that the police must enlist them to take back the streets.

“For a city to be prosperous, it needs to be safe and busy,” he said. “The police are a variable in that equation, but we are just one variable.” He tells his officers that he measures their success not in tickets written, but in the number of children riding bicycles on the street.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/01/nyregion/camden-turns-around-with-new-police-force.html