Four more journalists have been charged with felonies after being arrested while covering the unrest around Donald Trump’s inauguration, meaning that at least six media workers are facing up to 10 years in prison and a $25,000 fine if convicted.
A documentary producer, a photojournalist, a live-streamer and a freelance reporter were each charged with the most serious level of offense under Washington DC’s law against rioting, after being caught up in the police action against demonstrators.
The Guardian learned of their arrests after reporting on Monday that the journalists Evan Engel of Vocativ and Alex Rubinstein of RT America had also been arrested and charged with felonies while covering the same unrest on Friday morning.
All six were arraigned in superior court on Saturday and released to await further hearings in February and March, according to court filings. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said late on Tuesday that charges against journalists who were covering the protests should be dropped.
Follow this closely.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Politico and other Villager Media Outlets begin to explain this away as “the new normal” in 3…2…1…
cosima
RT America is part of the Putin propaganda machine. Wonder how they’ll get out of it yet leave everyone else on the hook.
Welcome to fascism. Fascism arrives wrapped in a flag, isn’t that how the saying goes?
dedc79
I expect you’ll be getting a lot of use out of that post title
PST
I’m betting on the RT reporter to skate.
Rabble Arouser
Five bucks says the RT America journalist gets kicked free while the rest cool their heels.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage: I don’t know. These are their own people getting fucked over this time. They’re sentient enough to know that they could be next in line, and if there’s one thing these people take seriously, it’s their own importance. They aren’t going to take this lightly.
Droppy
“We the People demand that Obama stop violating the Constitution” said every Tea Party idiot from 2009 onward while having no idea what the actual Constitution says about anything. Now that their dear leader is in place and the Constitution is under actual assault (see Amendments, Article I in this case), they finally have something to complain about; but as always with right wing morans, they will need the libtards to come in and clean up the mess.
raven
RIP Butch Trucks
Comrade Scrutinizer
@raven: Why do I think that people dying now are lucky that they won’t have to deal with the perfidies of our new President*?
Major Major Major Major
I was waiting to see if this story developed beyond an RT reporter’s arrest as covered by questionable lefty media. I see it has. WASF.
Immanentize
If your goal is to cow and criminalize the press, a clever way to start is by going after foreign press agents. Fewer institutional supports and perhaps some measure of public hostility. Then again, the Trump admin has not yet taken over the DC police and prosecutors entirely, so as John says, stay closely tuned.
Mnemosyne
@cosima:
Frankly, I’m wondering if the RT reporter was getting up to shit and is now trying to hide behind his press pass. And I hate that these fuckers have turned me into this conspiracy nut, but they just keep fucking conspiring to do bad shit.
raven
@Comrade Scrutinizer: Could be.
Weaselone
1. This was the DC police. Is there any reason to assume that Trump and his administration have anything to do with these arrests?
2. Any possibility that these arrests are actually warranted? Being a journalist isn’t a license to riot. If the journalists in question engaged in destruction themselves, or actively incited violence by the protesters, they should be charged.
Immanentize
@Comrade Scrutinizer: my mother in law was just diagnosed with stomach cancer. Bad stuff. I am certain she would prefer to live regardless of the political moment.
Major Major Major Major
@Weaselone: plenty of people get arrested for being near a protest. Happens all the time. What doesn’t happen is all of them being charged with a felony. And that is controlled by the administration.
Jeffro
Hey whenever folks (especially those in the media) are willing to open their eyes and see just how far these goons are willing to go, that’d be great. They are flat-out destroying the country as far as I’m concerned.
– no more science, let’s just burn ALL the coal and oil
– no more national parks, they’re gonna get sold off
– no more women making their own health choices
– no more health coverage for 20-30M Americans
– no more free press
– no more 1st amendment right to protest (unless you want to be charged with a felony or run down by a RWNJ motorist)
I’m trying to figure out which to push hardest for/prioritize: that our MoCs walk out of the SOTU at the drop of Trump’s first lie, start a campaign called “OWN IT” aimed at all the GOP MoCs, or redoubling my efforts w/ donations to ACLU/PP and op-eds
I guess the correct answer is, “All of the above”
Elizabelle
@Mnemosyne: Yup. I was wondering about that myself.
Weaselone
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s not really my point. If the journalists were actually rioting, or inciting riots they should be charged with felonies regardless of their status as journalists.
I don’t want everyone screeching about Trump oppressing the media, if it turns out these journalists were actually out breaking windows, starting fires and egging on the rioters.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Mnemosyne:
You’re where I was from the moment I heard this.
If they were stirring the violent side (like that rat bastard “blogger” from the Bundy gang), then it is appropriate to charge). If they were documenting only and hadn’t been given forewarning, then no.
But the RT guy? Fuck him and his horse. Let him find honest work, and then I might defend him.
Major Major Major Major
@Weaselone: I agree, but I think the chances that everybody in the square including journalists were rioting is very small.
Possible, but very small.
Jerzy Russian
How long before V. Putin scolds us for detaining reporters?
Jeffro
here’s another way to put it: the Financial Times notes that
cmorenc
@Weaselone:
The distinction between inciting or participating in a riot and being in close enough proximity to adequately cover (or interview) riot participants can be a tenuously thin one – consider the example of Anderson Cooper in Egypt during the uprising that overthrew Mubarak, and think of the potential analogy to covering anti-Trump demonstrations in the US. QUERY: the probability of arrests had CNN or Fox reporters also have been in proximity to the non-journalists arrested?
Mnemosyne
@Major Major Major Major:
Call me cynical, but I suspect that the odds of a guy from a Russian news outlet rioting or inciting others to riot are pretty damn high. The reason that Russia frequently accuses Western journalists of being spies is that a lot of their “journalists” are actually spies.
darrel wright
A good point to remember is that the standard playbook for these guys is to create confusion and division. If the administration is behind pushing this, it won’t be for a straightforward reason, for instance, they aren’t out to arrest all the opposition journalists. They may be trying to create that story, but the story itself is more likely the tactical purpose.
I’d like to know more about who these particular journalists were and see video of what it is that they are accused of doing before reacting in any way at all.
Ian G.
I’m ready for the military coup. I’d even suggest Evan McMullin as emergency president, as a gesture of good faith that this was done to remove a delusional tyrant, not conservative governing principles.
Since Congress appears to view its job much as the Iraqi parliament under Saddam Hussein did, I’m wondering what other options we have.
If we’re gonna deal with a new normal, let military operations against the government be part of it, because I trust the military a lot more than I do the civilian government at this point.
darrel wright
@Weaselone:
Exactly. Getting the hard left screeching may be the exact point here. Let’s wait and see who these guys and gals are and what the evidence of their “rioting” is.
MomSense
Donald Trump is afraid of facts.
Donald Trump is afraid of a truly free press.
Donald Trump is afraid of letting all eligible voters – exercise their right to vote.
Donald Trump is afraid of the Intelligence Community.
Donald Trump is afraid of science and data.
Donald Trump is afraid of free speech.
Donald Trump is afraid of women who make their own decisions about their bodies and lives.
zhena gogolia
@Jeffro:
Yep. This is what wakes me up every single night.
hovercraft
@Mnemosyne:
Wasn’t that asshole, James O’Keefe caught trying to bribe protesters?
Here it is :REVEALED: Activists catch James O’Keefe’s group bribing people to riot at Trump’s inauguration
lthough we haven’t heard much from right-wing activist James O’Keefe since his failed attempts to uncover voter fraud in Philadelphia last year, it seems he’s been keeping himself busy trying to bribe anti-Trump protesters to commit acts of violence at Trump’s inaugural ceremony.
However, O’Keefe’s plans to sow chaos at the inauguration on January 20 have been upended after he and his Project Veritas group fell victim to a counter-sting that the Huffington Post reports was carried out by The Undercurrent and Americans Take Action.
“The counter-sting… managed to surreptitiously record elements of O’Keefe’s network offering huge sums of money to progressive activists if they would disrupt the ceremony and ‘put a stop to the inauguration’ and the related proceedings to such a degree that donors to the clandestine effort would ‘turn on a TV and maybe not even see Trump,’” the Huffington Post writes. “To have riots blot out coverage of Trump, the donor offered ‘unlimited resources,’ including to shut down bridges into D.C.”
Watch an edited video of the counter-sting operation.
Major Major Major Major
@Mnemosyne: the reporter strikes me as more of a useful idiot type. Don’t forget that there were multiple non-RT journalists arrested too.
Look, it may be the case that these journalists who are mostly from outlets I’ve never heard of are propaganda tools, but this seems more like prosecutorial overreach. Even if one of them incited a riot it doesn’t mean the others did.
ETA: wasn’t it started by black bloc idiots?
@darrel wright: This is a very real possibility.
hovercraft
@Mnemosyne:
Never trust the fuckers, they are capable of anything.
REVEALED: Activists catch James O’Keefe’s group bribing people to riot at Trump’s inauguration
Captain C
Given that RT is basically Putin’s mouthpiece, isn’t this kind of a case of biting the hand that feeds you?
Это курам на смех
@Jeffro:
No, they’re not. They are too popular with the masses and too well protected by the laws. I work for the Forest Service, and some of our lands may be lost. But the real target is the hundreds of millions of acres of public rangeland administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). This is the return of the Sagebrush Rebellion from the Reagan era. The very real threat is that BLM land will be given away to states or put up for auction (at a fraction of its value) to corporations and foreign investors. The states don’t want them because they can’t afford to manage them (especially the massive cost of fire suppression), so in turn will sell them off.
The irony is that the Bundy boys and their fellow welfare ranchers will be pushed off all these rangelands or forced to pay grazing fees much much higher than the federally subsidized rate. And their militia buddies who want access to western hunting grounds and playgrounds will likewise be excluded.
If the push to give away the BLM lands succeeds, they will be coming for the national forests next.
Major Major Major Major
@Captain C: not if their goal is to keep any real dissent occupied with little distractions.
tobie
The prosecuting attorney in this case is an Obama appointee. Does anyone know anything about Channing Philipps? I’m assuming he decided on the charge against the protesters.
sharl
I’m a big fan of JJ MacNab, but I’m a bit troubled by a couple things in this tweet:
I didn’t see anything making this claim in the Guardian piece linked to by the tweeter she was corresponding to. And the word participating seems to be doing a lot of work here. This is, of course, also a downside of Twitter’s nature (facilitation of rapid & easy response and limit on number of characters).
But even if this is not true, but the perception of its veracity is accepted by a wider public, it adds yet another burden to journalists working on the front lines of chaotic situations.
hovercraft
@MomSense:
And he is most afraid now that he’s got the job, that he’ll never ever measure up to the man who preceded him.
He will never, ever be as smart, as competent, knowledgeable, handsome, personable, honorable, charming, well liked, svelte, athletic, accomplished, charismatic, and most of all, he will never ever be loved the way Obama is. This is what he fears and knows to be true in his bones, he will be judged inferior to a black man, and there is no way to hide his flaws and impending failure, it will be played out in full view if the entire world.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@MomSense:
Donald Trump is your cranky wingnut uncle’s chain email in the flesh. He reflects everything stupid about Caucasian olds – ridiculous blinders on race, bullshit sense of entitlement, false sense of history gained from movies, misogyny, bullying, naked racism, economic ignorance and excessive cultural hubris.
Essentially, pretty much like the white population of the Republic of South Africa during apartheid, but too numeric to convince that they’re not “all that”.
PGE
If journalists are freed it would weaken the message that you don’t want to be caught observing, or even near, a protest, let alone participating. I don’t expect the charges to be dropped, except for maybe the RT person.
O. Felix Culpa
@Immanentize: So sorry about your mother in law. Wishing all of you the best.
Peale
I doubt this goes very far. Since there were broken windows and fires set, well, now all will be rounded up. I don’t like this one bit since it means that in the future, all of our protests will end with provocateurs. The press in this country hasn’t been very good about standing up for itself for quite some time. The press can suffer indignities like being kept away from Deepwater Horizon, Ferguson and corralled in a pen during politcal campaign events to be mocked and the national news doesn’t seem to care much about it. The stories seem to go nowhere. I find it odd since the press has no problem making lots of issues about themselves.
amk
First, they came for me. …
O. Felix Culpa
@MomSense:
Well put. And in his fear, he lashes out at “enemies.” We have to call him out on this and resist at every turn.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: There was a story about this on the radio this AM.
1) They were charged with felonies because there was over $5k in property damage (estimated at $100k) and because there were injuries (to several police officers) in the events in question.
2) This is a DC law, not a federal law, that they’re charged under.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Immanentize
@Это курам на смех: how about Native American lands? Same analysis? Can’t be done?
Immanentize
@O. Felix Culpa: thank you. Things are grim in Chez Imm.
Captain C
@hovercraft:
And he would be 100% correct. Possibly for the first time in his life.
O. Felix Culpa
@Immanentize: Have been through it with someone I loved dearly. Warm thoughts and strength to you.
Peale
@Это курам на смех: O.K. you might know this better than I, for sure. But is there a process of redesignating a national park? I can’t imagine, for instance, even Republicans selling off the Grand Canyon or Yellowstone, but selling off bits and pieces of Gateway National Recreation Area for beachfront development wouldn’t surprise me. Does a Park need to be decommissioned (is that the right word? Deconsecrated?) by Congress, or does Trump have the authority to authorize his department of the interior head to designate the parks as “national forests” or some other type of land?
rikyrah
cjtown
@ladyc10
You know who called everything PBO Katrina? White liberals, and white pundits! They haven’t said shit about Trumps real Katrina #Georgia
Ian G.
@Это курам на смех:
I agree on the parks, and to me “they’re getting sold off!” is a left-wing equivalent to “Obama’s taking our guns!”
As someone who loves traveling to the parks, I can tell you that, more than hippies, more than Japanese and German tourists, the people who most visit them are old white people from places like Nebraska driving an RV around. National Parks are THE vacation destination for Trump’s voting base. The furious calls to Congress would likely crash the system should Trump so much as hint at such a thing.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: all of them, though? It’s standard practice to charge everybody near a riot? I know it’s standard practice to arrest them and shut it down quickly. But to charge everybody, levy an actual accusation?
Peale
@amk: How are you going to finish that? “First they came for me, but I did not speak out, but because I had multiple personality disorder and I thought I was a Kyrgyzstan shepherd”
rikyrah
You Goddamned right..we want all out war!!
Democrats Want To Pick Their Battles With Trump. Their Base Wants All-Out War.
Senators get that progressives want a fight, but they want to be pragmatic.
01/24/2017 11:56 pm ET | Updated 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON ― Shortly after the November election, a close associate of Dr. Ben Carson conceded the famed pediatric neurosurgeon turned Republican presidential candidate wasn’t right for a position in Donald Trump’s Cabinet since he had no experience running a federal agency.
Weeks later, Trump nominated Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Carson accepted.
Democrats were both befuddled and appalled at what seemed to be a cavalier decision to hand the keys of an agency with 8,300 employees and a $47 billion budget to someone with no apparent qualifications. And, for a while, the Carson nomination appeared to be fairly solid turf for them to put up a fight. But as the confirmation proceedings played out, something remarkable happened Tuesday. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), two of the most liberal members of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee ― which has primary jurisdiction over HUD ― supported Carson’s nomination.
In explaining his decision, Brown, who pointedly drilled into Carson’s views on public housing and the minimum wage during his confirmation hearing last week, said that he warmed to the nominee after finding areas of housing policy they both care about during a private meeting.
“I want to work with him on some issues like lead. He said the right things about LGBTQ discrimination. He seems interested in working on helping people whose rent is half their income stay in their apartments,” Brown told The Huffington Post on Tuesday evening. “Whatever he personally believes he has put aside.”
But the Ohio senator’s vote also reflects a larger strategy that Hill Democrats are beginning to embrace, not just with respect to Trump’s nominees but to his entire agenda. Less than a week into the new administration, these Democrats are concluding that the best path back to power is not necessarily through steady opposition but through picking specific, fruitful fights.
………………………………..
For those members, there is some political upside to demonstrating willingness to work with Trump when the time and conditions allow it. But those moments, like votes to confirm Carson, also come with a cost. Cooperation with the new president isn’t what millions of progressive voters were demanding from party leaders at women’s marches over the weekend, when they flooded city streets around the country with signs protesting Trump and demanding resistance.
By Tuesday afternoon, Warren was being torched by fellow Democrats on Twitter for her Carson vote:
NR
@Weaselone: The DC police chief responsible for this situation has done this sort of shit before. He’s an asshole.
amk
@Peale: That’s it. Just that one line. end. fin.
rikyrah
Forever44
@theonlyadult
The Dow tripled under Obama and 20k is still his economy. Sadly, he insisted on staying black, which prevent America from giving him credit.
rikyrah
Mikki Kendall Verified account
@Karnythia
“Chicago violence is at an all time high” Where were you during the 90’s? Did you understand what happened here during Prohibition?
Captain C
@rikyrah:
Wouldn’t it be more pragmatic to stay as far away as possible from having any of their fingerprints on the ongoing shitshow that is the Trump Maladministration?
ETA: We need some wartime consiglieres in the Senate, not compromisers-for-the-sake-of-compromise.
rikyrah
Trump dogged by insecurity over popular vote, media coverage
Jan 25, 2017
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump holds the most powerful office in the world. But he’s dogged by insecurity over his loss of the popular vote in the election and a persistent frustration that the legitimacy of his presidency is being challenged by Democrats and the media, aides and associates say.
Trump’s fixation has been a drag on the momentum of his opening days in office, with his exaggerations about inauguration crowds and false assertions about illegal balloting intruding on advisers’ plans to launch his presidency with a flurry of actions on the economy. His spokesman Sean Spicer has twice stepped into the fray himself, including on Tuesday, when he doubled down on Trump’s false claim that he lost the popular vote because 3 million to 5 million people living in the U.S. illegally cast ballots.
[…]
Less than one week into the administration, Spicer has twice been sent to the White House briefing room to reiterate his boss’ message. Trump is said to have approved of Spicer’s angry tirade against the media on Saturday, which included false statements about the inaugural crowds. But the president, who is intensely focused on optics, was said to be critical of Spicer’s on-camera image.
By Monday, Spicer was donning a darker suit and his lectern in the briefing room had been lowered somewhat.
Underscoring Trump’s habit of stoking rivalries among his staff, he has told people he wants his counselor Kellyanne Conway to be on television more. He cheered her use of the phrase “alternative facts” in a recent interview as a way to counteract what he believes is the media’s inherent bias.
Those around Trump are trying to get the cable news consumer-in-chief to be near a television less often, according to one person who has spoken with him.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: It’s not uncommon. I assume that most of them will be released unless they have actual evidence that they were actually participating. DC and the Park Police paid out millions as a settlements for a previous mass arrests – they’re not going to go that far again in charging people without evidence.
WTOP:
We’ll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who wouldn’t want to be one of those guys all dressed in black…)
rikyrah
Al Giordano Verified account
@AlGiordano
To the purity “progressives” growing frustrated that millions increasingly blame you for Trump’s presidency: It’s not going to stop.
rikyrah
Trump administration tells EPA to cut climate page from website: sources
Wed Jan 25, 2017 | 4:30am EST
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website, two agency employees told Reuters, the latest move by the newly minted leadership to erase ex-President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives.
The employees were notified by EPA officials on Tuesday that the administration had instructed EPA’s communications team to remove the website’s climate change page, which contains links to scientific global warming research, as well as detailed data on emissions. The page could go down as early as Wednesday, the sources said.
“If the website goes dark, years of work we have done on climate change will disappear,” one of the EPA staffers told Reuters, who added some employees were scrambling to save some of the information housed on the website, or convince the Trump administration to preserve parts of it.
The sources asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
A Trump administration official did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Major Major Major Major
@rikyrah: hell, I still blame them for Bush.
rikyrah
Sure he can. What do you think the test case with the Emergency Managers in Michigan was all about?
But, we’re supposed to be ‘ picking our battles.’
From Texas Democratics:
Breaking: Imperial Gov. Greg Abbott Attacks Will of Texas Voters
Austin, TX — This morning, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in an interview with Fox News, “said he and other lawmakers will seek new laws to remove Texas sheriffs from office if they do not fully cooperate with federal immigration officials over the handling of individuals who are thought to be undocumented immigrants.” Abbott said, “We will remove her from office.” [Austin American-Statesman, January 25, 2017]
Texas Democratic Party Deputy Executive Director Manny Garcia issued the following statement:
“No one made Greg Abbott the emperor of Texas. He cannot overturn the will of Texas voters.
“The very core of our representative democracy is the fact that citizens elect office holders who best represent their values. The vote and self-governance are sacred in America and in Texas. Whether Trump Republicans like it or not, that is the way American democracy works.
“Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is launching a new assault on the will of Texans. Texas Democrats will fight to protect the vote, defend Texas families against cheap political tricks, and focus on the issues that really matter most – giving everyday Texans a fair shot to get ahead.”
rikyrah
Russia Arrests Top Kaspersky Hacking Investigator for Treason
Today 9:44am
Under mysterious circumstances, Russia has arrested Ruslan Stoyanov, head of computer incidents investigations unit at the huge cybersecurity firm at Kaspersky. He’s been charged with treason.
It seems that Stoyanov was arrested alongside Sergei Mikhailov, deputy head of the information security department of the FSB in December, but the circumstances are unclear as Russia refuses to provide any information on the case. In fact, according to Forbes, the case will be tried under Russian criminal code article 275, which will lead to a “secret military tribunal.”
dww44
@rikyrah Do you know about this: the AJC reported yesterday that those who live in the Albany Georgia area had just been hit by another tornado a couple of weeks earlier and that requests to FEMA for help had not been answered for that one, which made them even more vulnerable when the next hit on Sunday? If this is true, then blame can and will be assigned to Obama’s FEMA team.
Это курам на смех
@Immanentize: Native peoples got royally screwed in earlier times, but ttheir status as sovereign nations has been greatly strengthened by the courts. There are loopholes to be exploited but I think their lands will remain intact.
Shalimar
@rikyrah: Picking battles is a fool’s choice. There will be battles you chose to capitulate on that turn out to be disasters for the opposition, and they will do everything they can to pin the blame on you for being dumb enough to support them. If you oppose everything, you never have to explain your vote for what turns out to be evil.
Это курам на смех
@Peale: I don’t know. My turf is the national forests.
Major Major Major Major
@Shalimar: i agree. I am rarely a fan of moral reasoning but it seems to be the only way to navigate this situation at the moment.
rikyrah
@MomSense:
You told nothing but the truth
rikyrah
Donald Trump Is Becoming an Authoritarian Leader Before Our Very Eyes
The administration’s many lies this weekend should frighten all Americans.
By Jeet Heer
January 23, 2017
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is expert at estimating crowd sizes. When trying to figure out whether a protest in some foreign hotspot could turn into a revolution, the CIA uses satellite imagery to get a sense of how many people are protesting. So it was particularly brazen of Donald Trump, while addressing the agency for the first time as president, to lie about the size of Friday’s inauguration crowd.
“We had a massive field of people,” Trump told a crowd of about 400 CIA employees at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, on Saturday. “You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show an empty field. I say, wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out, the field was—it looked like a million, million and a half people. They showed a field where there were practically nobody standing there. And they said, Donald Trump did not draw well.” Crowd scientists estimate that there were around 160,000 people at Trump’s inauguration in the hour before his speech.
In a bizarre press briefing later on Saturday, Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer ranted against the media and claimed, not just falsely but nonsensically, that Trump enjoyed “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period—both in person and around the globe. These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm of the inauguration are shameful and wrong.” In fact, the record is still held by Barack Obama for his 2008 inauguration, which drew an estimated 1.8 million.
And on Sunday’s Meet the Press, when asked to explain why Spicer “uttered a falsehood,” senior adviser Kellyanne Conway told Chuck Todd, “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying it’s a falsehood…Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.”
…………………
That column appears to have been completed before the weekend’s events, though; it makes no mention of Trump’s speech or Spicer’s briefing, which ought to change the calculus on the merits of press alarmism. The new administration’s bewildering boasts and outright lies are what make it so frightening, as they’re early signs of what many of us in the media have warned about for months: Authoritarianism.
The purpose of the Trump administration’s lies is not necessarily to deceive, but to separate the believers from the disbelievers—for the purpose of rewarding the former and punishing the latter. As chess champion Garry Kasparov, an expert in authoritarianism as an outspoken opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, tweeted on Saturday:
………………
In an already hyper-partisan political landscape, the Trump administration can blatantly lie, knowing that his base trusts him more than the “dishonest media.” And that’s exactly what Trump did in his CIA speech, which was rife with deceptions and examples of a narcissistic will to reshape the truth. While telling a story about a Time magazine reporter who wrongly reported that Trump removed the Martin Luther King, Jr. bust from the Oval Office (a mistake that was quickly corrected, but which the Trump staff continues to harp on), the president went on a tangent about Time.
“I have been on their cover, like, 14 or 15 times,” he said. “I think we have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine. Like, if Tom Brady is on the cover, it’s one time, because he won the Super Bowl or something, right? I’ve been on it for 15 times this year. I don’t think that’s a record…that can ever be broken. Do you agree with that? What do you think?” (The all-time record is held by Richard Nixon, who appeared on 55 Time covers.)
rikyrah
@Это курам на смех:
thanks for breaking it down about the real issue.
liberal
@Это курам на смех:
This was always one of my primary concerns with a possible Trump presidency.
A lot of stuff can be undone if the Republicans are kicked out of power. This cannot be.
rikyrah
Trump Doesn’t Get the Source of His Illegitimacy
by BooMan
Tue Jan 24th, 2017 at 11:33:37 AM EST
I have something to say about this, but it’s probably not what you expect:
………………………..
On one level, I can fully understand why Donald Trump and his political team do not want his presidency to be hampered from the outset with the stench of illegitimacy. For a variety of reasons, it’s very difficult to govern if your right to lead is not respected. As a result, it makes a lot of sense to push back at narratives that undermine his legitimacy. For example, when he says that he would have or at least could have done better in the popular vote if he had designed his campaign to win it rather than to win the Electoral College, he is correct. He won the only contest that matters, and he deserves recognition for prevailing according to the rules of that contest.
It’s obviously not correct to argue that he actually won the popular vote or was somehow cheated out of winning it. That only bolsters his legitimacy with people who are already giving his presidency legitimacy, and with gullible fools. Perhaps it is important to sustain their support, and maybe that’s his real motive here. But you can’t sell that lie to a room of people who are only there because they’re pros at winning elections. They are too sophisticated to buy your nonsense, and they are either insulted or begin to question your sanity.
Having badly lost the popular vote is a stain on his victory, as is the low turnout at his inauguration and the massive global protests that broke out the next day. His terrible approval numbers are also a concern. But his real legitimacy problems are coming from his connections to Russia and the way that the FBI intervened in the election.
If he were truly and sanely interested in preserving his legitimacy he would not do seemingly everything possible to bolster the impression that the Russians have something on him and that he is doing their bidding. He would not have made a man suspected of being a conduit to the Russians his National Security Advisor. He would not have named a man to serve as Secretary of State who had once been awarded a Friend of Russia award. He would not act as Vladimir Putin’s defense attorney at every opportunity, especially when he is critical of nearly every other prominent politician on Earth. He wouldn’t nakedly signal his intention to lift Russian sanctions without getting anything related to the sanctions in return. He would not adopt a posture consistent with Putin’s desire to undermine the European Union, nor go out of his way to criticize NATO and our Far Eastern allies. He wouldn’t call Angela Merkel’s policies “catastrophic.”
He can’t go back and undo his hiring of Paul Manafort or his connections to Carter Page, but he can stop acting as if the United States is now located behind the Iron Curtain. Yet, he refuses to stop.
It’s true that this posture only undermines his legitimacy with a relatively small subset of Americans, but those Americans include the members of Congress, the entire Intelligence Community, our military leadership, our State Department, and the media. In other words, he’s not seen as legitimate by the Establishment. That dissent is part of his appeal and explains his political success, but he’s not just a candidate anymore. If he cares about his legitimacy, he ought to see that it’s most badly undermined at the moment by his policies towards Russia and the lingering concerns about their role in getting him elected.
Instead, he wants to fight the media about crowd sizes and he goes to the CIA and disrespects their dead. He treats the truth in a way that is guaranteed to undermine his standing with authors and reporters and professors who will write about his presidency and create his legacy for posterity.
Fighting about the audience for his inauguration in light of all these other bigger blows to his legitimacy is a fool’s errand.
sukabi
@MomSense: that all applies to 99.9% of the repubs party as well…
rikyrah
Trump Threatens to Send The Feds Into Chicago
by Nancy LeTourneau
January 25, 2017 10:32 AM
……………..
Of course we don’t know what he means when he threatens to “send in the feds.” But if it was in reference to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or the FBI – they’re already there in big numbers. It’s hard to escape the possibility that he means something much more sinister.
With so much on his plate right now, why would Trump zero in on the problem of gun violence in Chicago? There are several possibilities.
There is also the possibility that Trump sees Chicago as a place to broadcast what he means by promising to be a “law and order president.” Given that the Civil Rights Division of DOJ just released their findings that the Chicago Police Department “engages in a pattern or practice of using force, including deadly force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution,” it is important to note what the White House has said publicly about their plans.
Frankly, I don’t see anything to suggest that Trump’s approach would be different from what he described in the full-page ad he took out in the heat of the arrest of the Central Park Five.
SFBayAreaGal
@Immanentize: I’m sorry to hear that about your mother-in-law. Do you know what stage she is?
sukabi
@rikyrah: also Mississippi…got hit hard by storms, tornados…have asked for help…crickets..m
EriktheRed
@rikyrah: Maybe that’s all by design. Provoking action against him will make it easier to do more of the draconian shit that his wingnut supporters already love him for.
Calouste
@hovercraft: The obvious solution to that from the shitgibbon’s perspective is not to elevate himself, but to take Obama and all his accomplishments down.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@raven:
Very sorry to hear that. Time to listen to “Trouble No More.”
And “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”
Calouste
@liberal: Everything can be undone. The problem for the billionaires is that that undoing could be an accelerated inheritance tax, 1789 style.
Mnemosyne
@dww44:
That’s the responsibility of the Trump transition team but, sure, let’s go ahead and let them put all the blame on Obama. That will solve everything! //
sharl
@sharl: JJ MacNab updated with a new tweet that helped to clarify the earlier tweet I linked above. You need to click over there to see the photos she attached:
J R in WV
@Another Scott:
A friend of mine was arrested with thousands of other people, and put in a stadium (RFK?) back during the protest against Nixon and the Viet Nam war.
Released the next day, and much later, after suits were filed and negotiations happened, he got a check for thousands of dollars. It was useful for paying off student loans from med school.
Thousands of arrested protesters x thousands of dollars + attorney fees = 7 or 8 digit numbers, back in the late 60s or early 70s. Then they did it again in the 90s, and in the demos against the World Bank etc in the 2000s.
So, not surprised they’re getting an early start here a decade later, not surprised at all.
Lavocat
Good luck trying to prove the elements of these charges. Never gonna happen.