That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons bring us some web forums whereupon we can gather
http://garbi.online/forum/
Doug Mastriano, a far-right 2020 election denier, is Pennsylvania Republicans’ choice for governor.
Doug Mastriano, a central figure in former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania, won the state’s Republican primary for governor on Tuesday, making the general election a referendum on democracy in the place where American representative government was born.
...
In his short time in public office, Mr. Mastriano, 58, has emerged as Pennsylvania’s leading far-right figure.
He funded buses to shuttle supporters to the rally on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the attack on the Capitol. During his run for governor, he has barred the news media from attending his campaign events and has appeared with proponents of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
NYT headline about violent coup to topple multi party electoral order of US republic apes talking point of party that orchestrated and covers up for sedition by casting attempt at national reckoning & accountability as a political horse race stunt
Awash in pink slime
Local Government Information Services is the publisher of lots of local news media in Illinois, with titles like “Southern Illinois News” and “SW Illinois news.” LGIS is part much larger network of local news in multiple states. As local news media has disappeared “pink slime” outlets like LGIS have taken their place, relying on low-cost or automated content repeated across sites, and eschewing basic journalistic practices.
Just how big and how connected these local news outlets is difficult to discern. In 2020, the New York Times counted about 1,200 connected local news outlets that had arisen in just 10 years...
...Behind this empire of pink slime is Brian Timpone, a conservative businessman and former journalist with a record of plagiarism and fabrication. It is not just that his media has an ideological outlook, or that it frequently uses deceptive practices such as the story detailed here. They are also directly funded by conservative advocates, a fact that is rarely disclosed to readers. At least $1.7 million could be traced going from Republican campaigns to Timpone’s companies, but the actual number is unknown given the shadowy nature of the flow of political money and the obtuse structure of these networks.
The Daily Beast
Verizon Fios, currently the largest pay-TV platform still carrying OAN, announced on Thursday afternoon that it had been unable to come to terms with the network’s owners on a new agreement and would no longer carry the channel after this month.
“Our negotiation with OAN has been a typical, business-as-usual carriage negotiation like those that routinely happen between content distributors and content providers. These negotiations were focused on economics, as they always are, but OAN failed to agree to fair terms,” a Verizon spokesperson said in a statement.
“Since we were unable to reach an agreement, effective July 31, 2022, we will no longer have the rights to provide our customers with this programming, and it will be removed from the Fios TV lineup,” the statement continued.
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Following DirecTV’s decision to drop the pro-Trump channel, depriving OAN of its biggest revenue stream by far, the channel has gone through an existential crisis. Besides dealing with a talent exodus and dropping employee morale, One America News also faces billion-dollar lawsuits over the election lies spread by its hosts.
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While OAN will no longer be available on Fios, right-wing cable viewers can take solace in the fact that the carrier will still carry one of OAN’s chief rivals. On Wednesday, a Verizon spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the company had “signed a contract with Newsmax and are pleased to continue to offer their content to our customers.”
1. Lee Zeldin is GOP Candidate for NY Gov
2. Platform: Fear over bail reform
3. Gets "attacked" at campaign event
4. Local prosecutor is also his campaign co-chair
5. Normally harsh, she charges lenient & allows release
6. Zeldin uses release to attack bail reform
7. Media bites.
It did not take long for the attack on Representative Lee Zeldin during a campaign event to become the latest flash point in the political fight over New York’s bail laws.
Hours after the attack last week, Mr. Zeldin, the Republican candidate for governor of New York whose criticism over the Democrat-led changes to the bail statute has been a key issue in his campaign, said on Twitter that he expected the man arrested in the attack, David Jakubonis, to go free.
He then spoke at length when his prediction came true, emphasizing in news conferences and television appearances how Mr. Jakubonis’s release without bail exemplified the issues with the bail law.
But almost immediately, the involvement of Mr. Zeldin’s political allies prompted questions about the incident. Many Democrats seized on the relationship between the candidate and the Monroe County district attorney, Sandra Doorley, who as recently as this week was listed on Mr. Zeldin’s website as a campaign co-chair. They noted that the sheriff who filed the charge against Mr. Jakubonis, Todd K. Baxter of Monroe County, was also a vocal opponent of the bail law.
And finally, they wondered why Mr. Jakubonis had been charged with second-degree attempted assault, a charge that is not bail-eligible, virtually guaranteeing that he would be released as Mr. Zeldin had predicted.
...
Donald M. Thompson, a partner at the firm of Easton Thompson Kasperek Shiffrin in Rochester and a criminal defense lawyer, agreed that the charge accurately reflected the allegations, that it was not particularly lenient and that it was not unusual for the two agencies to discuss the charge beforehand.
Asked if it could have been coordinated to the benefit of Mr. Zeldin, Mr. Thompson was contemplative.
“As a political consideration, could that have happened?” he said. “I think we can’t rule it out. Is there any evidence of that? Not that I’m aware of. But certainly people who are so inclined in that direction could make that argument. Because we don’t get to pull back the curtain, you can’t say, that’s why it happened or it isn’t why it happened.”
Here in Aspen, the air is thin, the snow is perfect, and money is everywhere. This is a singular American town in many respects. Among them is this: Aspen had, until very recently, two legitimate daily newspapers, The Aspen Times and the Aspen Daily News. At a moment when local newspapers face manifold threats to their existence and more and more American cities become news deserts, Aspen was the opposite: a news geyser. The town’s corps of reporters covers small-town tropes like high-school musicals and the Fourth of July parade. But Aspen’s journalists are also the watchdogs and chroniclers of one of the richest towns in America and a site of extreme economic inequality, the exemplar of the phenomenon that academics call “super-gentrification,” where—as the locals often say—“the billionaires are forcing out the millionaires.”
I joined The Aspen Times as an editor in 2014, after a seven-year tenure at the Aspen Daily News. The Times has published since 1881, when Aspen was a silver-mining boomtown, through its postwar rebirth as a ski resort, and now as the home of ideas festivals, wine festivals, $50 entrees, and an awe-inspiring collection of private jets, many owned by billionaires deeply concerned about climate change. The paper, which was based for much of its history in a purple-painted building between a drugstore and the Hotel Jerome, developed a reputation for shoe-leather reporting and accountability journalism.
On Thanksgiving 2021, the start of ski season, the Times editorial team numbered 13, including four reporters who had been covering our town since at least the 1990s. We were treated well by our parent company, Swift Communications. Our paper was profitable, owing largely to real-estate advertising. We seemed to be a safe harbor for small-town journalists.
We were wrong.
The reaction to the F.B.I. search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property created an immediate and furious backlash among Republicans. Even after two years of making political hay out of left-wing calls to defund the police, voices on the right are calling for abolishing the federal law enforcement agency. Stoked by Mr. Trump’s characteristic demagogy, his supporters immediately leaped to the worst and most dire possibilities without pausing to get the facts and targeted the F.B.I. as an institution.
This has led to mockery of the G.O.P. for being only selectively pro law enforcement. The rhetoric has been over the top — often outlandishly so — and we aren’t going to eliminate the F.B.I. and its investigations of terrorists, drug gangs, foreign agents and all other manner of crime.
It’s impossible to understand the G.O.P. reaction to the raid, though, without accounting for the context of the Russia investigation of Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign that consumed the first two years of his presidency. If the shoe were on the other foot and a high-profile Democrat were similarly targeted, the left would be just as suspicious of the authorities and defensive of the target as the right has been.
I had a minor epiphany that is possibly obvious to others but the NY Times OpEd page operates mostly in a parallel universe of their own construction that is aimed at an audience of older folks, run by older folks, to pretend everything isn't falling apart. It's like they've learned nothing about the rampant disinformation we have been flooded with since 2016.Kurth wrote: Mon Aug 22, 2022 12:20 pm Not surprised you beat me to this. Terrible, terrible op ed full of lies, and it’s beyond me why the NYT would publish it.
Yeah, I read that other piece as well. Compelling.malchior wrote: Mon Aug 22, 2022 12:25 pmI had a minor epiphany that is possibly obvious to others but the NY Times OpEd page operates mostly in a parallel universe of their own construction. It's like they've learned nothing about the rampant disinformation we have been flooded with since 2016. On the news side they had an excellent news analysis piece showing how Trump's endorsements were centered around destroying democracy and specifically addressed the misinformation used. On the OpEd side they are printing some of that same misinformation. The wall between the two obviously exists but it just calls into question what is going on inside the paper.Kurth wrote: Mon Aug 22, 2022 12:20 pm Not surprised you beat me to this. Terrible, terrible op ed full of lies, and it’s beyond me why the NYT would publish it.
I wasn't aware of that, although it makes sense - the WSJ has a similar parallel universe setup, only the WSJ op ed page is written by and for rabid Fox News viewers. Would explain a lot about the NYT op eds.malchior wrote: Mon Aug 22, 2022 12:25 pmI had a minor epiphany that is possibly obvious to others but the NY Times OpEd page operates mostly in a parallel universe of their own construction that is aimed at an audience of older folks, run by older folks, to pretend everything isn't falling apart. It's like they've learned nothing about the rampant disinformation we have been flooded with since 2016.Kurth wrote: Mon Aug 22, 2022 12:20 pm Not surprised you beat me to this. Terrible, terrible op ed full of lies, and it’s beyond me why the NYT would publish it.
On the news side they had an excellent news analysis piece showing how Trump's endorsements were centered around destroying democracy and specifically addressed the misinformation used. On the OpEd side they are printing some of that same misinformation. The wall between the two plainly exists or this shouldn't be possible. For me, it begs questions about what the heck is going on inside the paper.
It's mostly my opinion that I've slowly formed. For example, consider the weekly-ish Gail Collins/Bret Stephens coffee clutch column which is a throwback to when liberals and conservatives had a polite conversations about their disagreements. It's coffee with friends set atop the ivory tower. That world doesn't exist anymore for the vast majority of people now.El Guapo wrote: Mon Aug 22, 2022 4:50 pmI wasn't aware of that, although it makes sense - the WSJ has a similar parallel universe setup, only the WSJ op ed page is written by and for rabid Fox News viewers. Would explain a lot about the NYT op eds.
Read those words from a 150 years ago and you see in their intellectual descendants the voices of folks like Damon Linker and Ross Douthat. Well-meaning men perhaps but short-sighted and unrealistic. Or as I said in the other thread - smart dumb. They sound smart but it's dumb as hell. The problem isn't just that history rhymes it is that human nature hasn't changed.The arguments against prosecuting Trump don’t just ignore or discount the current state of the Republican Party and the actually existing status quo in the United States, they also ignore the crucial fact that this country has experience with exactly this kind of surrender in the face of political criminality.
National politics in the 1870s was consumed with the question of how much to respond to vigilante lawlessness, discrimination and political violence in the postwar South. Northern opponents of federal and congressional intervention made familiar arguments.
If Republicans, The New York Times argued in 1874, “set aside the necessity of direct authority from the Constitution” to pursue their aims in the South and elsewhere, could they then “expect the Democrats, if they should gain the power, to let the Constitution prevent them from helping their ancient and present friends?”
The better approach, The Times said in an earlier editorial, was to let time do its work. “The law has clothed the colored man with all the attributes of citizenship. It has secured him equality before the law, and invested him with the ballot.” But here, wrote the editors, “the province of law will end. All else must be left to the operation of causes more potent than law, and wholly beyond its reach.” His old oppressors in the South, they added, “rest their only hope of party success upon their ability to obtain his goodwill.”
To act affirmatively would create unrest. Instead, the country should let politics and time do their work. The problems would resolve themselves, and Americans would enjoy a measure of social peace as a result.
Of course, that is not what happened. In the face of lawlessness, inaction led to impunity, and impunity led to a successful movement to turn back the clock on progress as far as possible, by any means possible.
Our experience, as Americans, tells us that there is a clear point at which we must act in the face of corruption, lawlessness and contempt for the very foundations of democratic society. The only way out is through. Fear of what Trump and his supports might do cannot and should not stand in the way of what we must do to secure the Constitution from all its enemies, foreign and domestic.
It is. Mostly because everyone is modeling themselves as Glenn Kessler. He made it this way.El Guapo wrote: Thu Aug 25, 2022 8:41 am Yeah, this reminds me of the 'fact check' where Biden had said something like "this has never happened before" and the fact check was like "FALSE. We only have records on this going back to 1980" or something like that. Sometimes it feels like journalists doing fact check like stories feel like their job is to play gotcha, not to actually set the record straight or to inform people.
It's a good chunk of the straight news side and the entirety of the OpEd sections. I read the OpEd at Washington Post that just dropped and couldn't believe their take.They spend the whole thing scolding Biden for his tone (TOO PARTISAN!) saying he can't win people over that way. Let's be real. We never had a chance.Jaymann wrote: Fri Sep 02, 2022 7:08 pm After the "reporting" on Biden's speech, I think it has moved into the Official column.
There definitely was support but what I saw was a jamming signal that aimed to make Biden's speech just another bothsides are wrong event. It is hard to measure how effective anything is, but the distraction seemed fairly noisy and effective. It ended up with a lot of folks focusing responses well off the actual issue.Unagi wrote: Sat Sep 03, 2022 6:51 am I dunno. I’m reading a lot of support for what he said from a lot of different types of people.
What's troubling is the headline distorts the content of the story by focusing on a minor point in the article. It was a relatively straightforward and informative discussion about the issues.
Months after his company bought Politico, Mathias Döpfner stood atop Axel Springer’s 19-story headquarters, gazing out at the double row of cobblestones that mark the outline of the demolished Berlin Wall, and explained his global ambitions. “We want to be the leading digital publisher in democracies around the world,” he said.
A newcomer to the community of billionaire media moguls, Döpfner is given to bold pronouncements and visionary prescriptions. He’s concerned that the American press has become too polarized — legacy brands like the New York Times and The Washington Post drifting to the left, in his view, while conservative media falls under the sway of Trumpian “alternative facts.” So in Politico, the fast-growing Beltway political journal, he sees a grand opportunity.
“We want to prove that being nonpartisan is actually the more successful positioning,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. He called it his “biggest and most contrarian bet.”
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But weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, he sent a surprising message to his closest executives, obtained by The Washington Post:
“Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?”
His email was inspired by a news story he shared about the government’s plans to sue Google for abuse of market dominance, an animating issue of his for years. But Döpfner went on to argue that Trump had made the right moves on five of what he deemed the six most important issues of the last half century — “defending the free democracies” against Russia and China, pushing NATO allies to up their contributions, “tax reforms,” and Middle East peace efforts, as well as challenging tech monopolies — if falling short, he implied, on climate change.
“No American administration in the last 50 years has done more,” Döpfner concluded.
Asked about the email, Döpfner initially responded with a forceful denial. “That’s intrinsically false,” he said. “That doesn’t exist. It has never been sent and has never been even imagined.”
When shown a printout of the text, Döpfner allowed a glimmer of recognition. It’s possible, he said, that he may have sent the email “as an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump,” because that’s exactly the kind of ironic, provocative thing that Döpfner, a garrulous and enthusiastic texter, likes to do.
“That is me,” he said. “That could be.”
This pretty much boils down political discourse in 2022. The amount of people who call people on both sides fascists goes a long way to making the word lose meaning.Smoove_B wrote: Fri Sep 02, 2022 10:10 pm I wonder if there was any time when Trump called the Democrats fascists and no one blinked?
(spoiler: he did)