September 27, 2020

The NYT will be releasing additional articles on Trump's taxes in the coming weeks

Drip, drip, drip, you corrupt fucker!

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

“The Apprentice,” along with the licensing and endorsement deals that flowed from his expanding celebrity, brought Mr. Trump a total of $427.4 million, The Times’s analysis of the records found. He invested much of that in a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash — much as the money he secretly received from his father financed a spree of quixotic overspending that led to his collapse in the early 1990s.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html

September 27, 2020

To Beat Trump, Mock Him

The lesson from pro-democracy fighters abroad: Humor deflates authoritarian rulers.

Nicholas Kristof
By Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist

Can critics of President Trump learn something from pro-democracy movements in other countries? Most Americans don’t have much experience confronting authoritarian rulers, but people around the globe are veterans of such struggles. And the most important lesson arguably is “laughtivism”: the power of mockery. Denouncing dictators has its place, but sly wit sometimes deflates them more effectively. Shaking one’s fist at a leader doesn’t win people over as much as making that leader a laughingstock.

“Every joke is a tiny revolution,” George Orwell wrote in 1945.

American progressives have learned by now that frontal attacks aren’t always effective against Trump. Impeaching Trump seemed to elevate him in the polls. A majority of Americans agree in a Quinnipiac poll that Trump is a racist, yet he still may win re-election. Journalists count Trump’s deceptions (more than 20,000 since he assumed the presidency) and chronicle accusations of sexual misconduct against him (26 so far), yet he seems coated with Teflon: Nothing sticks.

America has had “Baby Trump” balloons, “Saturday Night Live” skits and streams of Trump memes and jokes. But all in all, Trump opponents tend to score higher on volume than on wit. So, having covered pro-democracy campaigns in many other countries, I suggest that Americans aghast at Trump absorb a lesson from abroad: Authoritarians are pompous creatures with monstrous egos and so tend to be particularly vulnerable to humor. They look mighty but are often balloons in need of a sharp pin.

No, I won’t be drawing cartoons or trying stand-up. I know my limitations. But I’m frustrated by the lack of traction that earnest critiques of Trump get, and I think it’s useful to learn lessons about how people abroad challenged authoritarians and pointed out their hypocrisy with the simple precision of mockery. I’m also frustrated that some forceful criticisms of Trump sometimes come across to undecided voters as strident or over the top. People like me are accused of suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and our arguments are dismissed precisely because they are so fervent.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/opinion/sunday/trump-politics-humor.html

September 27, 2020

The Tories are trying to ruin the BBC

Boris Johnson is reported to have offered jobs at the head of two of Britain’s most important media organisations to two outspoken critics of the BBC.

Paul Dacre, former editor of the Daily Mail, has been asked to run the national broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, while Lord Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and biographer of Margaret Thatcher, is believed to be considering accepting the role of chairman of the BBC.

The provocative choice of two such hardline anti-BBC voices has prompted anger and dismay across the broadcasting and entertainment industry. Speaking to the Observer on Saturday evening the Labour peer Andrew Adonis summed up the response of many to the news. “If true this is Cummings operating straight out of the Trump playbook with the intent to undermine our democratic institutions.” The former government minister continued: “These would be really disgraceful appointments. Neither Paul Dacre at Ofcom nor Charles Moore at the BBC would believe in the mission of the institution they are running. Dacre demonstrably doesn’t believe in impartially and statutorily regulated media and Moore doesn’t believe in public service broadcasting, as his refusal to pay the licence fee demonstrates.”

But reactions on Saturday evening were not all predictable. Even the iconoclastic Jeremy Clarkson, not normally aligned with the affronted liberal reaction, has spoken of his shock at the news. “I’d rather drive my lambo off a cliff than see Charles Moore as chairman,” he said. “BBC will go up in flames like one of my caravans.”


https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/sep/26/pm-offers-top-media-body-jobs-to-critics-of-bbc-say-reports

https://twitter.com/andrew_adonis/status/1310099598363578368?s=21


Cummings has announced Johnson’s appointments to run the BBC & Ofcom in today’s Sunday Times before the jobs have even been advertised

More Belarus than Britain!

September 25, 2020

Bloomberg just rolled out a $40 million ad buy in Florida

https://twitter.com/politvidchannel/status/1309635236037189633?s=20

September 25, 2020

Trump supporters are illegally crossing the US border into Mexico

https://twitter.com/senyorreporter/status/1309603669331988481?s=20


HOLY MOLY — a dirigible balloon promoting Donald Trump’s candidacy illegally crossed the US-MX border into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico and conducted an emergency landing in a park.

September 25, 2020

'I Feel Sorry for Americans': A Baffled World Watches the U.S.

https://twitter.com/adamslily/status/1309606341296697354

Just let this quote sink in:

“I feel sorry for Americans,” said U Myint Oo, a member of parliament in Myanmar. “But we can’t help the U.S. because we are a very small country.”


From Myanmar to Canada, people are asking: How did a superpower allow itself to be felled by a virus? And why won’t the president commit to a peaceful transition of power?


BANGKOK — Myanmar is a poor country struggling with open ethnic warfare and a coronavirus outbreak that could overload its broken hospitals. That hasn’t stopped its politicians from commiserating with a country they think has lost its way.

“I feel sorry for Americans,” said U Myint Oo, a member of parliament in Myanmar. “But we can’t help the U.S. because we are a very small country.” “The U.S.A. is a first-world country but it is acting like a third-world country,” said U Aung Thu Nyein, a political analyst in Myanmar.

The same sentiment prevails in Canada, one of the most developed countries. Two out of three Canadians live within about 60 miles of the American border. “Personally, it’s like watching the decline of the Roman Empire,” said Mike Bradley, the mayor of Sarnia, an industrial city on the border with Michigan, where locals used to venture for lunch.

Amid the pandemic and in the run-up to the presidential election, much of the world is watching the United States with a mix of shock, chagrin and, most of all, bafflement.


https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/25/world/asia/trump-united-states.html

September 25, 2020

How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler

This is from 2016 but still relevant.


Reports on the rise of fascism in Europe were not the American media’s finest hour

By John Broich, The Conversation
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
DECEMBER 13, 2016

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.


Benito Mussolini secured Italy’s premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925 he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.” Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid '20’s to early '30’s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932. But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.


Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-journalists-covered-rise-mussolini-hitler-180961407/

September 24, 2020

New Fox News poll

https://twitter.com/WardDPatrick/status/1309251938526154753?s=20


NEW Fox News Polls:

NEVADA
Biden 52%
Trump 41%

OHIO
Biden 50%
Trump 45%

PENNSYLVANIA
Biden 51%
Trump 44%

September 24, 2020

Why is the DOJ opening ballots? What is this fuckery?

https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1309224971970007040?s=20


After going viral with an unusual press release saying they found 9 discarded military ballots and all 9 were cast for Trump, the Department of Justice has deleted the release and issued a new one saying it's 7 for Trump and they dunno about the other 2.

September 24, 2020

Human to cat transmission of COVID-19

Two cats from different COVID-19-infected households in the UK were found to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 from humans, demonstrated by immunofluorescence, in situ hybridisation, reverse transcriptase quantitative PCR and viral genome sequencing.
Lung tissue collected post-mortem from cat 1 displayed pathological and histological findings consistent with viral pneumonia and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antigens and RNA.
SARS-CoV-2 RNA was detected in an oropharyngeal swab collected from cat 2 that presented with rhinitis and conjunctivitis. High throughput sequencing of the virus from cat 2 revealed that the feline viral genome contained five single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) compared to the nearest UK human SARS-CoV-2 sequence, and this human virus contained eight SNPs compared to the original Wuhan-Hu-1 reference. An analysis of the viral genome of cat 2 together with nine other feline-derived SARS-CoV-2 sequences from around the world revealed no shared cat-specific mutations.
These findings indicate that human-to-cat transmission of SARS-CoV-2 occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, with the infected cats developing mild or severe respiratory disease. Given the versatility of the new coronavirus, it will be important to monitor for human-to-cat, cat-to-cat and cat-to-human transmission.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.23.309948v1




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