Catherine Rampell has a few resolutions for the media. This one really hit home:
Don’t spend more time analyzing an idea that the president proposes than he spent coming up with it.
This one is hard, I know. Sometimes Trump says things that are just so wrong, in so many ways, that it’s difficult to resist the urge to enumerate all the details of their wrongness.
But a 4 a.m. cyberbullying toilet tweet about Kim Jong Un doesn’t necessarily mean there’s an actual, deliberate shift in diplomatic strategy. A blurted parenthetical about how he’d love to pass a middle-class tax cut, the biggest tax cut ever, doesn’t mean he seriously plans to propose such a thing. Let’s not pretend a secret plan actually exists and then conjure up tea leaves for experts to read.
Don’t impute more seriousness or thoughtfulness than ad-libbed drivel deserves.
Trump’s Twitter feed is like a chicken shit cannon from which the media is constantly trying to make chicken salad. It’s a goddam waste of time and the sooner they find a way to ignore most of it, the better for all of us.
lumpkin
That’s all very true but we all know that nobody in the national press is going to change their behavior. Even Chuck Todd’s sudden self awareness is probably just a new schtick to try to draw a few disgusted former viewers back.
PAM
I used to manage a lumberyard and our rule was that if someone brought in a drawing on a cocktail napkin we would devote about the same amount of time doing their estimate as it had taken them to draw it. Probably less as we would be sober at the time. Same concept. Seems so easy and obvious!
Quaker in a Basement
Chicken shit cannon?
This is worthy!
Kraux Pas
I heard Amy Klobuchar, for lack of a fork, once took a staff member’s comb to eat her salad on a plane.
Sometimes a quickly conceived ad-lib plan works and shows ingenuity.
laura
How are we to ever learn about the precise moment trump becomes “presidential” if the media doesnt obsess over imagined tea leaves? Asking for a friend.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Maybe one of the front pagers could weigh in and kind of explain to us laymen about all the Pentagon e-mails that got leaked today. Or maybe last night. We’re on vacation in Honduras, so I’m not altogether up on the news.
In one of them though, the writer said, “Clear direction from POTUS to hold [aid to the Ukraine].”
That seems like rather a big deal.
rp
I’m torn on this. Isn’t there value in calling out Trump’s “proposals” to say “hey, this is a terrible, idiotic idea for reasons x, y, and z”? I think she’s right that journalists shouldn’t impute seriousness to his comments, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t spend time attacking them.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Also it seems that the e-mails leaked we’re among those Donald Tяump withheld from the investigating committees.
MattF
So, Trump’s an asshole. You’d imagine that, at some point, the Major Media would tire of attempting to add gravitas to that fact. Clue: you can’t do it.
Jay
Ruckus
I figured out how to understand numbnuts tweets.
I Blocked Him.
I think my IQ rebounded at least 20 points with this simple step….
Jay
Kay
I just think they seriously underestimated the damage he has done and can do and will do and they are too proud to admit it. They think it’s “fine!” and it’s really not. I don’t expect them to be hair on fire members of the resistance but all he has to do is hold those stupid lie fests by the helicopter and they roll over? He targets them. They can’t even defend themselves let alone the public.
Jay
@Ruckus:
I found that Gollum J.Trump’s tweets better explain Doltus’s tweets, plus Gollum J Trump only does one or two a day, not hundreds.
If the Media want to dig deep into Doltus’s tweets, they should wait until they are properly curated in his Presidential Library.//
Cheryl Rofer
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): Quick explanation: We knew already that Trump insisted on holding the appropriation for Ukraine while the rest of the government balked. These emails show that the redactions in the emails released by his government were for the purpose of protecting people rather than anything to do with national security. Once again, the professional civil servants did their job under great pressure from Trump and his minions.
Amir Khalid
@Jay:
We had a little discussion the other day about tweet-bombing threads.
catclub
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): link?
susanna
Cheryl Rofer
@catclub: Just Security
For a tl;dr on the redactions, Natasha Bertrand has a nice Twitter thread.
rp
Has Trump said anything about Australia?
Jay
The tweet has a link to the Just Security site, their coverage and the documents,
the Conster
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
Schumer seems to think so. He released a statement about needing witnesses and documents for a Senate trial.
Martin
@Jay: So, for those not from fire areas. One of the negative feedback loops that develops is that when fire responders are maxed out, small fires that they could otherwise knock down quickly are ignored for more urgent needs and grow into larger fires. Australia passed that point weeks ago. The fires are beyond their capacity, they’re reliant on the weather to stop them.
One benefit of the US is that we have more resources to send across country, as well as being able to easily get resources from Canada and Mexico. Its not easy, but you can move a firefighting helicopter across the country. But Australia is pretty isolated we can’t send one there. Once they max out the continents resources, they’re in real trouble.
Johnny Gentle (famous crooner)
This is the problem with the rise of “punditry” and the need to fill countless hours of TV time. They’re all in on the game. No one knows or even cares what Trump means, they just need something to talk about because they can’t have dead air. The networks get to run segment after segment of panelists debating non-existent “policies,” while the panelists get to sell books or angle for future jobs or whatever.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Martin: That’s fucking scary. One more privilege we often overlook of living in the US/North America.
Gin & Tonic
@PAM: Funny story – the data communications protocol that has been at the heart of the Internet for the last 25 years (BGP) was initially sketched on a cocktail napkin.
Kent
@Kay: All true, of course. Except that AT&T and Amazon are both such god-awful companies I have a hard time caring.
Gin & Tonic
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.):
Please don’t do that. It looks really stupid – that letter is a vowel, not a consonant, and is nothing like an R.
Bill Arnold
@Cheryl Rofer:
Is it normal practice to redact such things? Or is there some national security excuse (not obvious to me at least)?
What other sentences in similar categories are being redacted?
Roger Moore
@rp:
There is probably value in calling out his proposals when they’re actually proposals, but not when they’re just another instance of Trump free associating in public. Both the media and the public have a limited amount of attention, which Trump is demonstrably taxing. Devoting time and effort to what is at best Trump thinking out loud and at worst him actively trolling us is a waste of those finite resources that should be devoted to his serious wrongdoing.
Fair Economist
@Martin: Even the US’ resources have gotten strained a couple of times in the past few years. No shocker that a country as large as the US with 1/10 the population is overwhelmed. The explosion in wildfire frequency and severity is alarming.
hells littlest angel
I think the print press is to some extent following this advice; certainly the WaPo is. I don’t know about TV news — I only watch a few shows on MSNBC which have a policy of not paying attention to his drivel.
Kraux Pas
Well, yeah, if you can read Russian.
Bill Arnold
Re Catherine Rampell’s comments, there is value in examining DJT’s tweets (his, not the ones done for him) and other ad-lib pronouncements, but the value is not in the semantics; it’s more about his mental state, about the top floating turds in the propaganda cesspool that he’s swimming in, and about which turds he’s choosing to float in the broader polity as lines of attack.
And etc. This stuff cannot be disrupted without it being understood.
The media isn’t very good at this (there are plenty of specialists not in the media) but they need to get a lot better and also (real-time) consult the specialists, else they will be continue to be reliably roll-able.
Mandalay
@Gin & Tonic: I’m sure that you know what you are talking about from a language perspective, but this may be the rare case where a lot of knowledge is unhelpful.
I suspect 99.999% of us who see “Tяump” simply take it as an (in)elegant way of associating Trump with Russia, just as many years ago Micro$oft was a cute way of referring to a very greedy company in Redmond. I doubt if anyone ever said “Micro-dollar-oft makes no sense!“.
Bill Arnold
@Mandalay:
G&T spices it up a bit by saying it’s not an appropriate way of associating Trump with Russia. :-)
Kent
@Bill Arnold: Trump is the government and tweeting is one of his official channels of disseminating official government policy. I strongly object to the notion that we shouldn’t take his tweets seriously. That’s what’s been fucking wrong with the media since 2016. They just blow off the crazy and lies as “Trump being Trump”
We don’t need a 20 page analysis explaining in detail why x-policy proposal is stupid. But his shit does need to be called out every time. Every lie and every criminally stupid idea.
catclub
Ummm, it was Amazon web services that was pushed out of the DOD contract. Do you have experience with them?
Jay
@Martin:
Canada and other Northern Hemisphere countries are sending/ have sent resources and people to Australia to fight fires, just like they do when we are burning. Poulson Aviation spends their spring season on contracts in the Med, (Spain, Greece, Portugal), their summer/fall in BC, winter in the south, (Chile, New Zealand, Australia).
The “problem” is that globally, fire “season” starts much earlier, ( April here, now, vs July a decade ago), lasts much longer, ( November here, now, vs September a decade ago), there are more fires, ( avg 2100 vs 265), they burn far hotter and more intensely*, and as a result, are larger. Added to the strain is that places that almost never burned, ( here, the Rainforest, taiga, tundra, moraine and high Alpine), now regularly burn.
”We”, ( depending on where you live in North America), haven’t been impacted as hard, because, funny thing, the impact models are turning out to be wrong. Mid latitutes are being buffered from the effects of Climate Change by the Oceans, high latitudes and equatorial regions sucking up far more of the added than is their “fair share” and at a much faster rate.
When Forbes comes out with their 2019/2020 Billionaires lists, keep in mind, a mere $300 billion spent would buy us 20 years grace from Climate Change.
*fires burning so hot that they sterilize the soil, consuming all the organic matter and soil organisms, even turning sand deposits into “glass”, are the new normal here.
catclub
@Kraux Pas: I object when they compare flows ( GDP – which is gdp per year) [Eg “$500B dollars – that’s like the GDP of Ireland!!!” not necessarily factual statement] with total amounts, which are not flows, so not dimensionally comparable. But nobody cares.
hitchhiker
Maddow has had it right from the beginning: pay attention to what he does, not what he tweets or says.
Who does he hire, who does he fire, what does he go to court over, who does he meet with and under what conditions … stuff like that. What he tweets or says is irrelevant, and if it gets covered at all, it should come with a shrug and two eyebrows way up.
Example: The WaPo three years ago (Jan 15, 2017) went ahead and printed this as if it were news.
Cheryl Rofer
@Bill Arnold: Check out Natasha Bertrand’s thread, the first tweet of which I posted upthread.
If I took some time to think about it, I might be able to come up with some sort of justification for the redactions. But when you put them all together, the way Kate Brannen did at the full article and Bertrand did in the Twitter thread, the purpose becomes obvious.
catclub
I saw that article in Bloomberg. It seems wildly optimistic. Of course, even if it is close to being accurate, not doing that spending, when it could be done, is criminal. A criminal tragedy of the commons problem.
I would expect $300B a year for 20 years as closer to the expected costs. But that will also not be spent any year soon.
ETA: the new editing system is Much better, I can use the html helper stuff after goofing up on the first go.
Bill Arnold
@Kent:
I agree that the policy pronouncements are important. They are however rare. There must be an accounting somewhere, but let’s say it’s 1 percent for this discussion. The rest are mostly emotional manipulation, some of it targeted at Himself the POTUS.
...now I try to be amused
Fun fact: The Russians write Trump’s name as Трамп, which transliterates to “Tramp”.
Jay
@Bill Arnold:
In the Dolt 45 MalAdministration it has become common to use the guise of National Security and the Classification Process to hide corruption, criminality, embarassment and late night phone lovefests with Dictators and Russian Handlers from oversight.
Bill Arnold
@Cheryl Rofer:
Mea culpa, hadn’t looked at the twitter thread, just went straight to the justsecurity article and searched on “redact”.
Yeah, it’s pretty clear. I’m mainly wondering if there is a [“can’t be laughed at out loud” – need word for this] explanation that would fly even in the center right parts of the US press.
chopper
@Gin & Tonic:
i’m suяe he won’t do it again.
mad citizen
catclub made me look up Trump’s wealth ranking at Forbes–he dropped 16 places in the U.S., to #275 and they estimate his wealth at $3.1 billion. I know many here–me included–are highly dubious of this or any number over one billion. I came across this choice paragraph–sounds about right–his two most valuable assets are things he never wanted (what an idiot):
Forbes: “Luckily for Trump, not everything he owns has his name on it. The value of his 30% stake in two nondescript office towers managed by billionaire Steven Roth’s publicly traded Vornado Realty Trust continues to soar. His share of those properties, 1290 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan and 555 California Street in San Francisco, are worth a combined $928 million—up $77 million from a year ago—thanks to timely renovations and strong markets for office space. The two buildings, which Trump did not want in the first place, remain his two most valuable holdings.”
Amir Khalid
@…now I try to be amused:
The idiosyncracy there is in the English spelling, not the Russian one.
Jay
@catclub:
there have been a bunch of studies done, from single model, ( eg.tree planting) to various mixed models, all focused on known and proven programs and technologies*, that all ball park a 20 year respite at a total cost of more or less, $300 billion.
*there is a Company here, pumping carbon out of the air, turning some of it into useable byproducts, and burying the rest of it as a landfill solid. The technology is scaleable. The issue is, the cost per ton is roughly 7 times the current carbon tax and 5 times the cost of carbon offsets. Right now, it’s only viable as a science experiment. The people who would be willing to run it as a charity have no money, and the people who could afford to run it as a legacy, have no interest.
catclub
@Cheryl Rofer: Thanks! Having people understand the relatively terse emails is a great help.
Jay
@Bill Arnold:
Administrations and Agencies, past and present, have at times, used and abused the Classification process and the redaction process for criminal reasons, to stupid reasons right out of Idiocracy.
I am quite certain that within a week, there will be “whattaboutisms” and other excuses flying around the Reich Wingnuttosphere that the Lumpenproletariate will find perfectly acceptable.
Many of them however, need no justifications or excuses.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I imagine it’s almost impossible for a normal human. I think “whatever” is the correct response to a Trump tweet.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
About Donald Tяump… I know that я isn’t an r in Russian. But as others have pointed out, it’s a quick way to highlight his servility to Russia. And this is a fairly widespread waythis is a fairly widespread way of informally invoking a feeling of Russianness.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: The Russian transliteration of Trump comes out that way because the short-“U”” phoneme – as in “Trump” or “but” – doesn’t occur in Russian, and the flat short “A” is the closest equivalent.
Zinsky
Amen, mistermix! I was just talking with my 27 year old son about this topic this morning! Ignore Trump – nothing pains him more! Don’t read another one of his idiotic, sophomoric tweets! That will crush that losers black soul!!
Kent
I’m sure they are perfectly good at what they do. But it was built on profits earned by gaming the tax system and destroying small retail in this country. The comic book store down the street from me pays more taxes than Amazon
Mind you I am opposed to Trump using the levers of power for retribution against his corporate enemies. Obviously. That should actually be additional grounds for impeachment. But Amazon can use some of their billions and their fleet of corporate attorneys to defend themselves. It is not something they need my help with.
Jay
Other people read Brooks so you don’t have to:
Gin & Tonic
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): “Fairly widespread” and “annoying” are not mutually exclusive.
Cheryl Rofer
@Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.): It does bug those of us who can read Cyrillic, though. I stumble over it. “Tyaump?”
Jay
@Kent
The JEDI contract went to Micro$oft, another stellar Corporate Citizen Personhood, simply because Doltus hates Bezos.
That is the “issue”, not the worthyness of the Corporate Citizen Personhoods bidding for the contract.
( and of course, you added context by editing, while I was busy writing,……… cue sad slide trombone)
catclub
@Jay: The other bit of context is that nowadays, the profits Amazon gets from AWS dwarf any profits it gets from the retail side of Amazon.
Jay
Andy Ngo is a threat to our communities and provides kill lists to Nazis.
Kent
@Jay: I don’t think we disagree.
All I am saying is that of the list of 100+ million different Americans and American companies that Trump has somehow screwed by his actions over the past 3 years, Amazon and AT&T are not the two that I am most concerned about.
It is possible for Trump and AT&T and Amazon to all be horrible. One does not negate the other.
Jay
Another Government Agency/Department completely corrupted by Doltism.
I hope people are keeping lists of all the “things” that Doltus and the ReThugs are breaking.
catclub
Is the actual big deal here that she got these emails from a leaker? It sure sounds that way from the description – not that they were the result of an FOIA request finally being fulfilled.
catclub
Which you might accept… As long as you don’t have access to the actual emails flying between the two sides.
Cheryl Rofer
@catclub: A lot of information comes out via leakers in the government. Some are “official” leakers – the administration wants to get the information out, but doesn’t want to do it directly for one reason or another.
In this case, it’s obviously not an “official” leaker – it undermines the nice face the administration tried to put on those emails by redacting all the incriminating stuff.
There seem to be a fair number of people in the administration who are willing to leak against the administration. They may be the civil servants who thought they were working for the American people and upholding the law. Or they may be people acting out various grudges in this continuing chaos.
The news story is the redactions and their obvious purpose of protecting the guilty.
ET
I wonder if they should start off every time they cover one of these with an explicit “We don’t want to spend too much time analyzing the (adjective of choice) story/issue/tweet about (target du jour) but we do have to mention it” It is as much a reminder to them as it is a signal that this story/issue/tweet is crap and they have to cover it buy don’t anyone get too invested in it.
The Pale Scot
@Kay:
Doing the right thing for the wrong reason. I’m totally ok with preventing more mergers, especially in the comm industry
Another Scott
TheHill – Williamson lays off entire campaign staff.
Good, good.
Maybe she’ll stop sending me e-mails now… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Jay
@catclub:
the unredacted emails came out this am,
the Office of Budget Management “spokesperson” lied about their content this afternoon.
With a straight face.
Not Cryptkeeper Kelly or other Doltus SPOK liars for hire.
The Office of Budget Management.
Baud
@The Pale Scot:
Saying “wrong reason” makes it sound like simply wrong policy, instead of a corrupt authoritarian action.
FelonyGovt
OT but kind of interesting- Lawsuit alleging Trump manipulation of markets
Baud
@Another Scott:
I didn’t realize she had a campaign staff
Martin
@catclub: That’s not quite true any longer, but AWS is one of Amazon’s better virtues. It has radically transformed how small businesses launch for the better. A two developer team can launch at the kind of scale that previously only a Microsoft could have afforded. Much of the app community has benefitted.
AWS is largely built around non-proprietary technologies. It’s highly modular and accessible, and it’s cheap.
For every mom and pop retailer that wasn’t able to adapt, a mom and pop tech shop replaced it. The difference is the former were relying on a geographic monopoly (the only place in town to buy toothpaste) but the latter have largely launched in tech hubs, so its easy to not see the shift of jobs.
What’s more, the retail crisis isn’t what it appears. WalMart did much more damage by sucking local tax coffers dry moving into smaller towns (part of their DNA as Sam Walton focused on smaller, underserved markets). Since Amazon supposedly would put retail bookstores out of business, there are now 50% more independent bookstores than there were 15 years ago. Amazon didn’t put the mom and pop shops out of business, they put the chain retailers like Borders out of business. The indies were able to adapt by providing services around their business that were appealing to the community – from book readings to coffee shops to whatever else the community desired. They’re thriving, relatively speaking.
Amazon doesn’t impact local tax revenues in that way. But they do bring infrastructure to small towns that were normally reserved for large cities. It was never hard to get anything you wanted delivered to your house in NYC long before Amazon was conceived of. But you could now do that in Oshkosh. That’s a neutral thing – potentially bad for retailers, but good for a lot of other business types. But if you were a retailer relying on your little geographic monopoly, you were pretty screwed.
Martin
@FelonyGovt: There’s no question something fishy is going on there. Not only can federal regulators know who made those trades, you don’t close a trade like that without a mandatory review by the SEC checking for insider trading.
It’s only now illegal for govt officials to do this thanks to the STOCK act that Obama signed into law in 2012.
Amir Khalid
Liberpool lead visitors Sheffield United 1-0 at halftime in their first match of the new year. They look well in control of things, but will want at least a two-goal cushion to get really comfortable.
mad citizen
@FelonyGovt: Very interesting indeed! Thanks for posting. I hope the rule of law will prevail here.
catclub
@FelonyGovt: That lawsuit is a rehashing of the Vanity Fair report, which was fairly well debunked as not what they claim. The basic objection of the debunkers was that the VF article did not understand how the futures markets work.
I would put no expectation of it coming to anything.
I think Hiltzik is an excellent finance reporter:
FelonyGovt
@catclub: Thanks, I read Hiltzik all the time in the LA Times and like him as well.
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
Sadio Mané finishes off an elegant Liverpool attack that started with Alisson rolling the ball out to wingback Andy Robertson who found Mané who played a quick one-two with Mo Salah before shooting and then putting the rebound. Liverpool 2-0 Sheffield United.
Bill Arnold
@FelonyGovt:
The vanity fair piece was in October 2019[1]; the news is that Reps. Ted Lieu (CA) and Kathleen Rice (NY) are on it. ETA see above comments. The evidence is thin though not IMO thoroughly debunked.
[1]“There Is Definite Hanky-Panky Going On”: The Fantastically Profitable Mystery of the Trump Chaos Trades – The president’s talk can move markets—and it’s made some futures traders billions. Did they know what he was going to say before he said it? (William D. Cohan, October 16, 2019)
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
Liverpool see out a comfortable home 2-0 win against Sheffield United to maintain their lead of 13 points plus a game in hand. It has now been a year since the Reds lost a Premier League match; that was at Manchester City, who went on to pip Liverpool to last season’s title by one point.