Category Archives: Media
Fake Oscars
Payback was hell at the Oscars. Variety pins the blame on a PricewaterhouseCoopers executive named Brian Cullinan. But I suspect Russian hackers.
Trump Media Relations
Media relations with President Trump hit a new low when he dubbed the press the enemy of the American People. Last August The Atlantic compared Trump’s authoritarian tendencies to the rise of Mussolini. And two days after the election in November the New Republic claimed Trump was already acting like an authoritarian.
But National Review says he’s less authoritarian than Obama.
Media Relations
Vox says authoritarian states ain’t so bad.
Trump Swamp Drainage Project
Swamp drainage was at a standstill last week. The Washington wetlands are filled with protected species and the permitting process is more complicated than expected.
The Trump Media war ended the week in a standoff when the president took the offensive in an hour and fifteen minute press conference on Thursday.
Leaks and Lies
Eli Lake in Bloomberg View thinks people in the permanent government selectively leaked highly classified information to damage a political appointee. He calls what happened to Michael Flynn a “political assassination”.
Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do…
Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me Monday that he saw the leaks about Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak as part of a pattern. “There does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,” he said. “From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.”
Resist The Vote
What the people carrying “Resist” signs really don’t like are the Deplorables who voted for Trump.
An October Huffington Post headline read “Trump’s Refusal to Accept Election Results has Americans fuming.” And Hillary called Trump a “threat to Democracy” for refusing to say in advance he’d accept the results of the election.
Resist
But Trump won and now the shoe’s on the other foot. A Reason headline about protesters at Berkley says, “Thugs indulge their Weimar Dreams and Become the Totalitarians They Claim to Hate.”
