I can’t add much to what Anne said. There are a lot of isolated facts floating around about Trump’s Russia connections and what the Russians may have done in the election, and a lot of speculation on how those facts fit together. My own sense is that there are SO MANY Russian connections that it’s likely that the Russians had more than one route into Trump and his people.
There are still many possible narratives. We need more information to be able to verify one or more.
It’s not clear that Robert Mueller’s investigation has a narrative, either. They appear to be going for the low-hanging fruit, meaning the obvious connections. By investigating those, they find other leads, and so on. That’s a divergent process, producing more leads than can easily be followed. So judgments must be made on what to follow up.
I made the judgment some time ago that I’m not going to try to collect all the details connecting Trump to Russia. It would be a full-time job. Even following up one thread is a full-time job. The folks at BuzzFeed are doing a good job on some of those threads, as are some Washington Post reporters.
I know there is an overwhelming feeling here that the New York Times, and Maggie Haberman in particular, is doing a terrible job covering Donald Trump. I can’t disagree with that, but I think there are mitigating factors for which I have some sympathy.
Jay Rosen has an incredibly brief explainer on normalizing Trump, which is what Haberman and some of her colleagues continue to do. He points out some things about Trump.
He isn’t good at anything a president has to do.From the simplest, like pretending to help out in flood relief, to the hardest: making the call when all alternatives are bad. (We’re told he can be charming one-on-one. So maybe that’s his one skill.)
He doesn’t know anything about the issues with which he must cope. Nor does this seem to bother him.
He doesn’t care to learn.It’s not like he’s getting better at the job, or scrambling to fill gaps in his knowledge.
He has no views about public policy.Just a few brute prejudices, like if Obama did it, it was dumb. I do not say he lacks beliefs — and white supremacy may be one — but he has no positions. His political sky is blank. No stars to steer by.
Nothing he says can be trusted.
His “model” of leadership is the humiliation of others— and threat of same. No analyst unfamiliar with narcissistic personality types can hope to make sense of his actions in office.
Rosen goes on to argue that this is so far from anyone’s expectation of the President of the United States that reporters must change their reporting model.
I must admit to a small bit of sympathy. Other world leaders, including Kim Jong Un, follow a much more normal model. So in analyzing world events, one must apply the usual standards to others while looking at Trump through a different lens. The problem is that if you take Rosen’s six points seriously (and I do), nothing can be analyzed, nothing can predicted. All commentary on Trump then descends to one or more of those six points, repeated over and over again.
This is why we all feel very tired at times. I was beat Friday night, could barely think about anything. It is the same craziness, meanness, impulsivity, lies, and corruption, repeated. It is profoundly discouraging to have to admit this about the President of the United States. That, plus whatever guilt they may feel about having helped to elect him, is bound to scramble reporters’ minds.
I’m not sure what’s a good model for covering Trump. Probably long breaks to recover one’s sanity would help, and more interaction with real people, as on Twitter, which Times reporters avoid.
Baud
Nope. No sympathy. He was this way during the campaign, and they changed their reporting model to cover emails 24/7 rather than Trump. They made this bed, and it is our right and duty to call them on it.
Another Scott
Probably the best thing the press could do is ignore what he says in Twitter. It’s just noise.
Like this:
They don’t cover what Pelosi or Ryan or Schumer or McConnell say on Twitter – why should they pay any attention to the stupid stuff Donnie says? It’s either totally banal (“He says he’s having meetings and making phone calls! Much Presidential!!1”) or transparently false (four 7th Fleet collisions since January is not a sign that our military is getting stronger by the day – it’s actually the reverse).
Why do they cover it? Because it’s easy. They need to stop being so lazy in their coverage and start actually reporting.
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
It’s not just the press. There were plenty of reporters stating the truth about Trump. Shame on the many voters who didn’t seek further or question why there could be differing accounts about the man.
NotMax
@Baud
Agreed. As suggested previously, prefacing each and every story with the sub-head “This Is Not Normal” ought to be de rigueur.
sukabi
@Baud: agree, but with added scorn.
Trump has been a known entity for decades to the “journalists” of the NYTimes, and they CHOSE to pretend his behavior and record were unknown and covered him like a novelty giving him cover and unending support while constantly covering the unending supply of rumor mongering on Clinton.
No sympathy for them at all. If you could jail “journaliats” for malpractice the NYT would be a vacant building.
Amir Khalid
If I read him right, Jay Rosen is saying that journalists realise full well that Donald Trump is making a mockery of the Presidency and doing serious harm to the country. And because they can’t bear to document this awful truth, they try to pretend that Trump is a normal president, and cover him as such. I was a journalist myself. I call this attitude professional cowardice.
NotMax
Open Thread tag interlude: the guttering torch passes.
Corner Stone
@debbie: The press abdicated their responsibility in favor of clickbait nonsense.
Baud
@Amir Khalid: They can’t bear losing access to Republicans.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
@Amir Khalid: As a non-journalist, I call that attitude professional cowardice also.
SiubhanDuinne
Taking advantage of Open Thread designation to mention that I decided, on a whim, to see the 35th anniversary screening of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. It’s part of the Fathom/TCM/Big Screen Classics series. Haven’t seen it theatrically since it was released in 1982, though I own it on DVD. Anyhow, I have fond memories of it and will be eager to see if it holds up. Starts in about 15 minutes.
Baud
@sukabi: The president of the United States tweeted a video of himself striking a woman with a golf ball.
Remember when everyone lost their shit when Kathy Griffen had that video with Trump’s severed head. Granted, that’s more violent, but Kathy Griffen isn’t the president or Commander in Chief.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax:
Interesting. Nami Tajima, the new World’s Oldest Person, was born on the exact same date as the late Queen Mum — August 4, 2000.
ArchTeryx
@SiubhanDuinne: In some ways it definitely does, though I’m curious if they’ll show the CGI-enhanced version that came out on DVD. In other ways, though, it’s most definitely a product of the 80s.
(Fun fact: It’s part of a loose trilogy that Stephen Spielberg always planned when it came to alien contact. The “friendly” entry was E.T. The “neutral” [and most likely] entry was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The “hostile” entry was his version of War of the Worlds, still one of the more insane movies to ever come out).
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne: Wait, what?
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
The press, and the New York Times most of all, have to shoulder a lot of the blame for how we got here. There isn’t any way this clown should have ever gotten more than 40% of the vote, but too many outlets went out of their way to give a fair shake to “both sides”. I can’t wait to see how they handle the seemingly inevitable race that pits a Democrat against a convicted Republican serial killer. “Well, yes, the senator has killed and eaten 53 women. On the other hand, his Democratic opponent once took a telephone call from a guy who slept with a hooker. So I think we can all agree that there’s blame on both sides.”
Corner Stone
@Baud: I think the Y2K bug got to her.
Baud
@Corner Stone: I blame Bill Clinton.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
E.T.: E.T. phone home.
Kids today: There’s not an app for that?
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
The article NotMax linked is about the death of the previous World’s Oldest Person. The new one is a woman from Japan, and she was born on August 4, 1900 — the exact same date as the late Queen Mother Elizabeth.
ETA: Oh wait, okay, I see. My bad typing. 1900, not 2000. Sorry.
Cathie from Canada
Remember that Washington reporter who was quoted before the election talking about how boring it would be if Hillary won and how much more fun it would be to cover Trump.
Did anyone ever find how who that was?
And/or has anyone asked him since if he is still having fun, considering how many hundreds of thousands of people Trump is hurting?
OzarkHillbilly
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): Donald trump got 46.1% of the vote, under performing the avg Republican by 1%. No matter what happened, he was always going to get at least 45% of the vote due to tribalism alone.
germy
@Baud:
That’s Hillary Clinton.
Corner Stone
@Cathie from Canada:
Guaranteed that person is having the time of their life.
scav
@SiubhanDuinne: Everyone has been aging unnaturally fast for the last half year — maybe she has an extreme case of it?
Baud
@germy: Doesn’t matter who she was. It doesn’t really even matter that she was a she.
debbie
@Corner Stone:
Agreed. All his dream are become true.
Baud
@debbie:
Yep. Remember that NYT subscriptions and MSNBC ratings are way up.
Baud
@germy: Is it an old video of her?
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
Taking advantage of open thread opportunities to ask Cheryl: Is John Mearsheimer (and for that matter, Stephen Walt) above-replacement value for a foreign-policy professional?
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Quip for you to give a test drive at the next gathering of classical music aficionados.
Q: What’s Dolt 45’s favorite Russian composition?
A: Caucasian Sketches.
schrodingers_cat
Katy fucking Tur can cry me me river. T kissed her without her permission, she kept mum, when she could have done something about it. His supporters called her the c word be she and her cohort covering him kept normalizing him. What hard hitting journalism has she been responsible for, that may be I missed?
Corner Stone
@Baud: I still want to grab all the Obama Bros that exhorted us to dutifully subscribe to the NYT, throw them into a room and announce a nut punching contest.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Minus one. I refuse to read Vichy R Normalizing Garbage Times.
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: Yep. Today Trump retweeted a meme showing Secretary Clinton being hit with a golf club. How the hell is that presidential? The original tweet’s creator has the Twitter name “Fuctupmind”.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: I’m confident she would have stayed silent if Hillary had forcibly kissed her.
schrodingers_cat
@Corner Stone: Tom Levenson is an Obama bro?
donnah
Yes, the president of these United States retweeted a mock video of himself, hitting Hillary Clinton with a golf ball. This will be a lead story all over the place, with chuckles and tsk-tsking about what a cut-up Trump is, and how no one on the Left can take a joke.
What really needs our attention is the new information being discovered about the Facebook revelations regarding the Russian vote peddling. This is a new heap of goodies for Mueller to process.
And let’s focus on the newest threat against health care being cooked up by the Republicans. There’s a lot happening! Time to grab the Senator’s ears again.
Every day Trump will be as outrageous as he can be. We can’t let it become normal.
Amir Khalid
The only “reporting model” a reporter should ever need to follow is a simple one: report on people and events/affairs as they really are.
Patricia Kayden
@schrodingers_cat: I agree with you wholeheartedly. If a candidate is using his supporters to threaten you, why is your media org covering him as if he were a dang rock star? MSNBC normalized Trump by giving him continuous coverage during the election cycle — even while he encouraged threats against Tur.
Ruckus
@sukabi:
drumpf is also a New Yorker. A “wealthy” New Yorker. Yes he’s a loon, yes he lies about his wealth, yes he’s a racist, misogynistic asshole, but he’s a New Yorker. He’s one of them or at least one they’d like to be. How could they dis him? That would be like dising his lifestyle, which they wish they had. He hates the same people they do. No, he’s a New Yorker, he’s one of them. He’s on the home team. Who dises the home team? No matter how bad they are.
trollhattan
@SiubhanDuinne:
So we’re all out of folks whose lives span three centuries (and two millennia). Kind of sad, if inevitable.
Corner Stone
@schrodingers_cat: IMO, Tom is merely misguided in his analyses re: NYT and various reporters. The tag Obama Bros is more specific to Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor and Jon Lovett – the former Obama staffers that now do Pod Save America and other podcasts.
They all went all in on the desperate need to subscribe to the NYT to keep journalism alive.
Patricia Kayden
@Cathie from Canada: If he’s not part of any of the groups who are suffering under Trump, he may still be having fun.
Baud
@Corner Stone: We should just vote for Republicans to minimize internal conflict while we’re at it.
trollhattan
@donnah:
I’d have a hard time arguing that it’s not already happened. Nobody is surprised at anything he does, except perhaps the Nancy-Chuck thing (presuming there’s an actual thing, which I’m wary of believing).
NotMax
@trolhattan
Not quite yet.
Strictly speaking, 1900 was the final year of the 19th century, 1901 the first year of the 20th.
Citizen Alan
@Cathie from Canada:
Nothing new here. It wS Margaret Carlson who got caught on the Don Imus show in 2000 laughing, literally laughing about how Bush had just as many gaps and misstatements as Gore but it was “more fun” to go after Gore for them.
Baud
At least Vox is saying something
Amir Khalid
@NotMax:
Yes, and celebrating the new millennium on the first of January 2000 was premature. But nearly everyone gets confused by all the zeroes.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I wouldn’t expect any less from a sexual predator.
germy
@Citizen Alan:
I assume Ms. Carlson didn’t lose any loved ones in the Iraq war.
Major Major Major Major
@Corner Stone:
With Buzzfeed, ironically, doing better than most of the legacy outlets.
schrodingers_cat
@Corner Stone: If what they do is journalism than it is better dead than alive.
Baud
@germy: To be fair, I doubt she could have predicted 9/11 or how Bush would misuse it. Still a scummy attitude.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: Me either.
Corner Stone
@schrodingers_cat:
Now you’ve done it.
Nun With A Chainsaw II: Come Get Nun!
– A disillusioned Mother Superior has begun to question her faith. Until the Unholy Undead decide to try and take revenge for the biblical beatdown Mother Mary dispensed on their coven.
This time it’s for keeps, and only one Mother is tough enough to save a sinful civilization!
germy
@Baud: I’m no expert, but I knew the minute Bush won the election his first plan was an invasion of Iraq. This was before 9-11.
I remember telling my wife after Gore conceded. “Watch, we’re going to war with Iraq.” And I’m no pundit or villager.
Cheryl Rofer
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): Not sure what you mean by “above replacement value. Both Mearsheimer and Walt belong to the school of foreign policy known as realism. Mearsheimer got Ukraine wrong, big-time, and said early on that they should have nuclear weapons. Later he said it was a good thing they didn’t, without admitting to the earlier position. He is the grand old man of realism, or some subfield of realism, of which there seem to be several.
For a while, I found Stephen Walt really smart on a number of issues, but for the past few years, not so much. I’m not sure whether that’s me or him. In any case, he has redeemed himself with this op-ed.
I’m not sure if he wrote the headline, but it’s consistent with the rest of the piece.
I have some big gripes with realism. Someday I’ll read Kenneth Waltz’s “Man, The State, And War,” their founding text, again. I have some suspicions about it but don’t recall it well enough so will have to read it again.
Major Major Major Major
@germy: Yeah, I figured that one out and I was fifteen.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: You are a baby!
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: Oh, you knew.
germy
@Major Major Major Major:
It was in the air. So many stories; so many editorials about how shameful it was we didn’t “finish the job” and how we let those poor people down, etc.
MattF
Rosen’s list is pretty accurate, but it leaves out a few things. Like ‘Trust No One’, and the ‘Art of the Deal’ is really the ‘Art of the Screw’. And the question– who is the man behind the curtain? There’s no one there, and Trump knows it.
J R in WV
Got home last night late, nearly midnight, after getting up at 5 am (edt) in Colorado, driving from Pueblo to Denver International, flying around a lot, and driving home. So about 19 hours on the road/in the sky.
Dogs hugely relieved to see us, actually the cats were too, although they were standoffish for a couple of hours. Now they all are within 4 feet of me, snoring a little. Trashbag bit the dirt, some “accidents” to clean up from being inside too long.
Had a great vacation in Denver/Pueblo, some pics, mostly of interesting urban stuff, buildings etc, we didn’t do outdoors much having been there and done that for 40 years we’re nearly retired from rural exercise. Museum was fun, small compared to NYC and DC museums but nice. Great food everywhere. Spent one day at Denver Mineral, Fossil and Gem shows, saw a $85K young T. Rex that would maybe, barely, fit in your living room! But then were would you sit? Might be a good investment, surely a conversation piece!
In Denver we stayed at an old-fashioned place downtown, across the street from some good copper roof pictures. In Pueblo we visited with old friends and met new friends of old friends. Some folks I hadn’t seen since the 60s. There was a parking deck a block away where several photo shoots happened on the roof, I took pictures of the pro taking pictures, that was entertaining.
Legal 420 was fun, too. Such a head twist to see a full page ad in the local paper for local Cannabis Distributor, and to see various Dispensaries on the “Clean Colorado” highway signs.
We were in slow traffic on I-70 between the Airport and I-25 to downtown headed due west one afternoon in a warehouse district. Suddenly on both sides of the Interstate there were big warehouse buildings with the rooftops covered with giant HVAC units. At the same time you suddenly could smell that smell of growing green grass, in your sealed car with the A/C on high because it was 90. Amazingly giant grow-houses not interesting to anyone else around us…
Anyway, back on line again, to bother everyone.
OzarkHillbilly
@Cheryl Rofer: “above replacement value. is a baseball stat:
Brachiator
Haberman and her colleague are planning on writing a book about Trump. This seems like a huge conflict of interest. They are not so much reporting on the White House for the Times as cultivating assets and relationships for future use.
As for Trump being a different kind of president, once he has been elected, everyone assumes that he is capable or will grow into the office. Even more than the problem of an unfit hereditary monarch, there is no constitutional or even psychic room for the idea of an incompetent president. And the Republicans will never admit their mistake in selecting this clown to be leader.
And of course the elephant in the room is that white America can never admit that they freaked out over a competent Obama, rejected a capable Hillary and embraced a moron to be their leader. And die hard fools insist that Washington insiders and the liberal media are preventing Trump from making America great again.
Major Major Major Major
@J R in WV:
Sounds like you could’ve used a hyperloop!
ETA where did you stay downtown? Brown Palace? I used to live in one of those copper tops.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: I knew you were young compared to the average Juicer demo but I didn’t know how young. I was in grad school.
Corner Stone
@germy:
Hmmm, we’ll be the judge of that. Take him to Room 101!
Mike in NC
@schrodingers_cat: Katy Tur is busy hawking her new book. Maybe Trump will ask for a free signed copy.
Timurid
@Corner Stone:
Actually, no. That’s what’s really frightening about this. There is no better clickbait than Trump and his scandals, but the media has passed on that chance every time, both while he was a candidate and while he is President. “Trump the Monster,” “The Russians Are Coming” and “Watergate 2.0” would get clicks. All of the clicks. Yet the media always settles for thin gruel, dull and hard to follow stories like Hillary’s e-mails or whatever the hell Antifa is.
This suggests not ineptitude or simple selfishness but intent. The media, or more precisely, the people who pay them, are acting this way because they are all in on Trump and his authoritarian, white nationalist agenda. They may not care much for Trump personally, but they want a King and he’s the only guy who volunteered for the job.
schrodingers_cat
@Mike in NC: And more. You know he is a grabber.
germy
@Brachiator:
I’m currently reading Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here” (I just reached the part where the fascist candidate wins the nomination) and more than a few of his fans are saying “He’s sharper than you think. He just says that crazy stuff to excite the rubes” etc.
There are so many parallels it’s frankly alarming.
germy
@Corner Stone: not the rats…
Corner Stone
@Timurid: I think you mistake the definition of clickbait. Those do not lead to substantive stories, with facts and evidence and backup that makes you think about your choices. Clickbait is all the superficial shit that everyone in the Trump orbit can shrug off or double down on, whichever serves their purpose at the moment.
Thoughtful David
@debbie:
No, it’s the press. The press (editors, publishers, owners) are the ones who set the agenda. It doesn’t matter what their reporters do, those people decide what gets seen. And if it’s not on page one, it’s pretty much buried. So, had the FTFNYT or FTFWaPo or whatever ever decided to run a series of stories about Trump’s Russian connections and corruption and incompetence, they could have, and might have made a difference. But they didn’t, because they didn’t want to. They tongue-bathed Trump, and ran huge headlines daily about Her Emails and Benghazi. Even the FTFWaPo had one reporter who was investigating Trump’s corrupt foundation, and constantly finding more and more corruption. Even the vaunted FTFWaPo ran those stories on page zz437, below baby announcements and want ads for used trucks.
The decision what to run is rarely made by the reporters.
rikyrah
If you want a chart to follow about the Dolt45/Russia connection,
go to
http://www.billmoyers.com
A retired attorney has made this his pet project. He has connected the dots so that you don’t have to. It’s always growing. It literally changes over the course of a week.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Cheryl Rofer: By “above-replacement-value” I meant if his work was appreciably better than what you’d expect from the average Joe in the discipline (or for that matter the average in foreign policy). I’d also had my gripes about realism vis-à-vis morality – it doesn’t help that they’ve been opportunistically used as covers for those who subscribe to the, shall we say, Stephen Cohen school of FP on Russia – but the intimation that “even realists consider Mearsheimer a clown” was a new one to me.
And IIRC, did Walt also advocate Ukrainian nukes?
Comrade Bukharin
If that creepy spider ad keeps appearing I’m going to stop reading this blog.
trollhattan
@NotMax:
Virtually nobody paid attention to the “real millennium” pests on 12/31/99; thankfully there were no Facebook and Twitter wars.
Timurid
@Corner Stone:
When I think of how the media responds to Trump, I compare it to how they respond to other dangerous things like terrorism or hurricanes. In those cases they amplify the threat and focus on worst case scenarios. Because that gets clicks. But when dealing with Trump, somebody who is an order of magnitude more dangerous than either of those, their response is minimize, minimize, minimize. Even though they have both compelling altruistic (warning the public) and self-interested (clicks/ratings) reasons for doing otherwise. There can be no good reason for that. None.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Timurid: This nihilistic piece about Bloomberg 2016, from last February, gets more and more repugnant the more I think about it.
Brachiator
@donnah:
Too late.
Steve in the ATL
@J R in WV: I’m heading to Denver this week. I don’t smoke but I still love it out there. Hopefully I can work in some hiking around this stupid arbitration, but apparently the people who pay me expect some work out of me. Bastards.
@Major Major Major Major: the Brown Palace is my favorite haunt (ha!) there but this time I’m a block away at the Warwick. Also love the Oxford. Lots of cool places there.
Brachiator
@germy:
There are radio talk show hosts who say, “ignore his Twitter messages, and watch what he does, because he is a successful businessman and a master negotiator.”
Corner Stone
@Steve in the ATL:
Why don’t you send them a pic of a hiking boot on the neck of humanity? Wouldn’t that satisfy all requirements?
Baud
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): That’s Jack Schafer. Didn’t he just pen an anti-Hillary piece?
Cheryl Rofer
@Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD): I know that morality often comes up in regard to foreign policy realism, but my objection is that it doesn’t do what it says it does. I suspect that I have more fundamental objections than that, but confirmation will have to wait for me to read Waltz again.
As in any academic discipline, there is a varying degree of hostility among the different schools and individuals. Mearsheimer seems to have peaked, though. Some get better with age, but he hasn’t. He’s still no slouch imho, but no longer a leader in the field.
I don’t think Walt thinks Ukraine should have nukes. At least, I’m not recalling that, and I think I would if I had read it.
Another Scott
@Cathie from Canada: satby has a similar story.
Cheers,
Scott.
Frankensteinbeck
@Timurid:
I don’t think you have to go to their paymasters. Everything I’ve seen suggests 90% of the national press agree with Republicans about almost everything, ESPECIALLY how scary brown people are.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
Yeh, it was so old fashioned, but they threw out their dress codes, as many of their customers think torn jeans and lots of ink is formal attire. Great hotel architecture, piano player all afternoon in the lobby for “tea”. $18 G&T was the only downside.
The copper roof was a tiny Museum of Western Art, didn’t go inside but the building was fabulous. You had to ring the doorbell to get in…
Denver is way hip, which was fun. We live in about 1958, and Denver feels more like 2030… lite rail, pedicabs, really nice. All different in the winter, I’m sure. Not really anxious to see that, we get it here from time to time, even still yet.
germy
@Brachiator: I admit I was unfamiliar with the work of Sinclair Lewis. I read his novel about Henry Ford when I was in high school.
When I bought “It Can’t Happen Here” the clerk told me that particular title is selling well.
ThresherK
@Mike in NC: How soon before he resells it?
“Should i autograph it ‘To President Donald Trump…’ ?”
“Just make it out to ‘eBay’ “.
“That’s not how it works…”
Tenar Arha
@Another Scott: I’d add a corollary, they should look first at what Faux is selling that AM & start asking/reporting that he’s tweeting based on one single news program or RT bots rather than consulting his Cabinet etc.
J R in WV
@trollhattan:
Part of that was the huge amount of work and tension surrounding the 1999-2000 time change. Y2K was a very real thing, and many IT shops spent millions of dollars to be sure systems would work as intended on 01-01-2000. My shop was fortunate to have implemented brand new windows-based systems running against Oracle DB in the late ’90s, so we had on hell of a sweet new years party that year.
ETA… of course that was from my perspective as an IT systems builder, so YMMV.
Kelly
I relocated a spotted skunk we live trapped out by the chicken coop this morning. Went just fine kinda to my surprise. Walked up to the trap hiding behind a sheet of black plastic. Laid the plastic over the trap, set plastic wrapped trap in a cardboard box. Put the box in our utility trailer and headed off to a logging road about 5 miles away. Set the trap out and uncovered it enough to free the wee beastie. He dashed to cover under some tree roots, stopped for a long while looking back at me with a WTF look. Hope he’s happy there.
Kelly
@J R in WV: Y2K was the final payment to my retirement scheme. A lot of work was done. My IT career was often a case of when I did a good job it looked like they didn’t need me after all.
trollhattan
@Kelly:
If you’d waited a bit longer you’d have seen him pull out a tiny GPS and map featuring a red circle labeled “chikkns heer”
Cheryl from Maryland
@SiubhanDuinne: Let us know. Here in the DC/Maryland/VA area, the National Air and Space Museum will be showing it in IMAX.
trollhattan
@J R in WV: @Kelly:
Hazy memories now but back then seemed like Big Biden Deal (certainly true in many areas, especially infrastructure and the DoD). As to waiting for 2001 to welcome the millennium I always leave the final word to Douglas Adams.
J R in WV
@Kelly:
Yes, the best IT work is quietly professionally invisible. When shit hits the fan it’s usually not good IT practice at fault. Sometimes it’s end users “keeping secrets” or not understanding what’s important in their work from the data perspective. When the two collide, bad IT and hostile end user community, the pits open.
Everyone decided Y2K was blather about nothing. After the IT world spent billions of dollars and 3 years of work to make things work well on New Year’s Day 2000.
Butthurt Jordan Trombone (fka XTPD)
@Baud: “Prophylaxis, informing our readers and the well-being of the state all mean nothing, compared to keeping our jobs a minutiae-powered sinecure.”
That explains SO much about what’s wrong with the Village. That, and “too ugly to be an actor but too stupid to be a wonk.”
smintheus
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Recently I corresponded back and forth with the local reporter who wrote this piece about a Republican rally denouncing Charlie Dent, one of the few semi-moderate Republicans left in Congress. In a story purely about how crazy the Republican base has become, the reporter nevertheless inserted the obligatory both-sides-do-it nonsense.
I called the reporter out for it, pointing out that the smear of Democrats had no place in the article, was unsupported, and false equivalency at best. I also told him that journalistic cowardice such as this was how we got here.
He would admit to none of that, and kept pathetically trying to find ways to document how Democrats are equally extreme.
No matter how thoroughly I rebutted his excuses and justifications, he refused to admit that both-sidesism is an issue at all.
debbie
No, Ben Stein, we don’t need you.
https://twitter.com/foxnews/status/909065917899968512
Miss Bianca
@Brachiator:
QFT, sir, QFT.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: I’m having trouble getting outraged about Haberman’s (and her collaborator’s) book.
What about Corn’s ‘Showdown’? Hasn’t it been the case for decades that reporters with access to important people write books, the pols know that, and one of the reasons why they get access is to enable longer-form reporting (with a beneficial spin)?
Her work should stand on its own, whether she has access for a book or not. And what little I’ve seen of it doesn’t stand up very well at all.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Thru the Looking Glass...
This right here…
I just love the way Trump and all the ass h*les he’s surrounded himself with keep claiming the whole Russian mess is just FAKE NEWS and there’s NOTHING, I tell you, NOTHING to any of it!
And every frickin’ time you turn around, there’s another Russian popping up… secret meetings with Russians at Trump Tower… secret trips to the old Eastern Bloc to talk to Russians… Cabinet officials that are great friends w/ Russians… connections to banks that launder money for Russians… Russians in the Oval Office LAUGHING for the cameras… Russians buying and renting condos in Trump properties all over the place… plans to build a Trump Tower in Russia… it’s endless at this point… how many times have the Trumpanistas been caught lying about meeting w/ Russians? And why is Jeff Sessions still the AG of the US?
But… it’s all just a series of AMAZING coincidences and there’s really nothing, I tell you, NOTHING, to any of it…
One of the things I dislike the most here is that some people clearly think the rest of us are as stupid as they are and as easily fooled as the idiots they keep spoon feeding this shit to……
Jinchi
@NotMax:
Doesn’t that depend on whether you count from year zero or year one?
Chris T.
@Jinchi: Yes, it does … but there was no Year Zero. They counted “1 BC” and then “1 AD”. Just like I count this year as 2017 AD and next year as 1 ANE (After Nuclear Extermination, scheduled to occur in December when Trump blows everything up).
I sure hope I’m kidding…
Seriously, the problem is that there was no “year zero”, but the solution is to observe that all this date-assigning was arbitrary and after-the-fact and they got it wrong, so we can just pick whatever the hell we want and call it good. :-)
Another Scott
@Comrade Bukharin: Cole and Alain have almost no control over the ads that you see here.
Install “uBlock Origin” or your choice of ad-blocker in your browser. Then occasionally kick in some money (via the PayPal link on the front page) to make up for the ad revenue loss.
You’ll be happier.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bonnie
Bill Moyers has a timeline on the Russia contacts with Trump. You can find it here: http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-timeline/
Why reinvent the wheel.
Psych1
Denver – best city for jazz in US. KUVO on FM & Dazzle downtown bar.
Brachiator
@germy: .
I think I read this long ago during the Ice Age, when I was in high school, when I was reading all kinds of dystopian fiction. It is very interesting to see that this book is popular again.
Lewis was a sad, fascinating character. The first writer from the US to win the Nobel Prize for literature. 1930? Yep.
ThresherK
Jay Rosen is a must. And he’s beating up the milquetoasts so badly, will he ever be on TV?
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
The problem is that the executive editor of the New York Times is a moron. And also the fact that since newspapers are dying, some reporters seem to be hedging their bets and making deals to look out for themselves. In the worst cases, they are almost more like freelancers than reporters who actually work FOR their newspapers and who report to the editor and publishers.
There are reporters whose books go into more background and detail than their daily reporting. But the work of Haberman and her colleague is already superficial and fawning. That’s not good for anyone except Trump. And it seems to try to curry favor and to produce a sellable book. Wonder who will get the movie rights.
Joyce Harmon
@Thru the Looking Glass…:
I KNOOOOW! And what’s so weird is that Russia, while geographically vast, is economically TINY. It’s GDP is less than one TENTH that of the US. It would be odd if Trump’s orbit included that many connections to say, Brazil or India – and yet both of those countries have larger economies than Russia does – and THEY are allies, or at least not our enemies. So it’s not just some big ol’ coincidence that Trump is surrounded by people with Russian ties. Either he sought them out or they sought him out, but he’s downright married to Russia.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Joyce Harmon:
And yet according to the Donald, he has absolutely ZERO ties to Russia and has never even met Vlad…
Geez… it gives me an ice cream headache to even write that…
But then, Vlad did say that he wasn’t Donald’s groom and Donald wasn’t his bride…
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Looking over Trump’s current tweet storm, I don’t think we will ever figure this Russian thing out, I doubt if even the Russians are quite sure what happened because Trump and the people around them seem to live in another universe.
gene108
The media treats Trump like a toddler in potty training.
“You pooped in the potty? You are such a good boy. You can get a treat”.
That sure as hell isn’t how any grown ass man should be treated.
Brachiator
@Joyce Harmon:
Russia got oligarch thieves with tons of money. A grifter like Trump could never pass up an opportunity like this.
Cheryl Rofer
Here’s a good article on what should be the next steps with North Korea.
John Fremont
@Psych1: Dont forget the Nocturne and of course, El Chapultepec by Coors Field.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Brachiator:
True…
Unfortunately for Donnie, he’s a bush league grifter compared to Putin and his inner circle… hell, Putin just doesn’t talk about shooting people… he actually has them killed…
Donnie’s in over his head w/ this bunch…
John Fremont
@J R in WV: The Y2K preparations also came in very useful during 9/11. With NYC effectively crippled during the first few days afterward, the major banks were unreliable for the credit markets. The Federal Reserve banks activated their Y2K protocol to keep the interbank lending on track.
Brachiator
@Thru the Looking Glass…:
Ah, but Trump is President of da whole US and A now. He thinks this makes him a big time operator.
And you know what? It kinda does, even if it is like Fredo in charge of the Corleone family instead of Michael.
…
Jinchi
@Cheryl Rofer: CNN was just banging the war drums. Nikki Haley, H.R. McMaster, Rex Tillerson and a collection of Bush era alumni were on, pushing Trump’s “Fire and Fury” agenda. I’m not sure if the background video of tanks, bombing raids and precision missile strikes, playing behind a “Nuclear Threat” chyron were from the “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, but it sure feels like 2003 all over again.
cmorenc
Lots of sociopaths and even outright psychopaths are skilled at presenting a superficially charming persona one-one, which is very useful in lulling people into the false sense of comfort that causes them to drop their guard enough to be maneuvered into a vulnerable position for abuse.