Press

The policy of the Republican Trump White House is that if a reporter or commenter says something that the White House strongly disagrees with, the reporter or commenter should be fired. It remains to be seen how the Trump White House will enforce this newly articulated policy. The policy was provided as a response to a question about an African American reporter identifying Trump and the White House as being aligned with white supremacy, which is a widely held and well documented truth. Cindy Boren at the Washington Post has more here.
I've made the point several times now. We live in a constitutional democracy, but many of the first line (and last line) protections are not enforceable laws, but rather, agreements made among people who all want to live in and respect a constitutional democracy. But if a large enough cadre of members of Congress, a gaggle of highly placed judges, or a President decide to act in a way that conflicts with those conventions, they can actually get away with quite a bit. The US Congress is run by such a cadre, pretending to engage in a democracy but willing to break the non-enforceable laws…
The press has had enough of being called liars by the liars. I'm not a big fan of MJ, but the very fact that MJ has quotable conversation about this is a change in how the world works. Here's another thing dictators do: Make up accolades. Trump created a fake TIME magazine cover and hung it in several of his golf clubs. It has him on the cover. That issue of TIME never happened. It is not just fake news, it is an entire fake news magazine. Details here. Here it is. Interesting set of headlines:
Its like this. Only with Trump instead of Josh, and it is real life. Yet, less like real life. Trump, remembering something about watergate, tweets: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/863007411132649473 and the Washington Post reports: Trump suggests there may be ‘tapes’ of his private conversations with former FBI director Trump experiences verbal diarrhea and says, "In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should…
It is with some trepidation and more than a little regret that I begin writing this piece. The reason for my hesitation is that, by doing so, no matter what I say I'll be inserting myself into what appears to be a disagreement among people all of whom I admire very much. I don't really want to do it, but I feel obligated, because the issues brought up in the disagreement are important, and reasonable people can disagree--sometimes strongly--about them. I also believe that someone whom I admire greatly has made a regrettable mistake. Over the last week or so, I've been blogging a lot about the…