January 19, 2019

A possible chink in the armor of willfully ignorant tRumpsters.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/17/many-voters-think-trumps-a-self-made-man-what-happens-when-you-tell-them-otherwise-224019

“Large swaths of the public believe the Trump myth. Across three surveys of eligible voters from 2016 to 2018, we found that as many as half of all Americans do not know that he was born into a very wealthy family.”

“A LexisNexis search of leading newspapers from January 1, 2016, until Election Day 2016 found more than six times as many articles referring to Trump’s divorces than those mentioning his father. The problem is not just that the media prefers the salacious to the substantive; the practices of even serious journalists may not always produce an informed public. By 2016, Fred Trump’s aid to his son was in the distant past. It had been reported over the years, so . . ., it just wasn’t “news” to reporters. Yet without repeated coverage, many voters who do not follow politics closely will not absorb the facts that journalists take for granted.”

January 15, 2019

Is anyone else inspired by Rachel's Watergate history lesson?

If I weren’t falling asleep after a very long day, I would start a MoveOn petition to demand Mueller’s presence at Barr’s hearing tomorrow. Maybe someone from the DU community is inspired to make it happen.
https://petitions.moveon.org/create_start.html?source=front_nav&utm_source=front&utm_content=nav

January 9, 2019

Given tRump's Oval Office immigration fiasco, major networks must change.

They need to stop cowering in fear over spurious accusations of “left-wing bias,” “fake news,” and “enemy of the people.” James Fallows’ Atlantic article offers effective guidelines for how to deal with the malignant orange creature going forward.

“They were not afraid of criticism for turning down Obama. They are afraid about what would happen if they turned down Trump. You can think of lots of explanations. But the difference is clear.

An instructive parallel: During the 2016 campaign, James Comey’s FBI was closemouthed about the ongoing investigations of Trump and his Russian connections. To have said anything about them would have opened the bureau to criticism of playing politics. But when it came to discussing Hillary Clinton’s email situation, obviously the calculus of potential criticism was different. . .. My point for now is what military planners call the “asymmetric risk,” which warped the FBI’s behavior and that of much of the press.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/trump-networks/579697/

January 2, 2019

Eichenwald Twitter thread connects tRump to Russian disinformation scheme.

I’ve been waiting for someone else to post this on DU, but haven’t seen it so far. It seems too significant to ignore. The thread is long, and I had to read it twice, but it makes a credible case for asking some pointed questions. First on my list is, who provided content from a Russian disinformation site to tRump, who pushed it at a rally within two hours after it was first posted?
https://mobile.twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1079860540271484931