“If Bob Corker has any honor, any decency he should resign immediately. He should not let those words stand, what he said about the President of the United States.” Those are Steve Bannon’s words from earlier this hour on Hannity. Corker should resign his seat in the Senate for criticizing the President.
Ronna Romney McDaniel, Chairperson of the RNC, explaining why President Trump cannot in any way be compared to Harvey Weinstein. “He didn’t have women coming forward.”
RNC chair says allegations about Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump are “not even comparable” https://t.co/blAHyKbYw8 https://t.co/UreeUn2Pp4
— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) October 9, 2017
I just reread this Times OpEd “Will Liberals Give Weinstein the O’Reilly Treatment?” It’s by a staff writer at the Times opinion section, Bari Weiss. I’ve seen a number of articles like it. The subtext of all of them: While O’Reilly may have been run out of town on a rail for entirely legitimate reasons, a big part of the equation was not his behavior but politics and partisanship.
Will Weinstein get similar treatment? Read More
Yesterday The DailyBeast wrote up another thread of the Russian election subversion campaign on social media. The latest is a Youtube web show by “Williams” and “Kalvin Johnson”. According to their legend, Williams and Kalvin are two BLM activists from Atlanta who supported Bernie Sanders and then supported Donald Trump in the general election over the “bitch” Hillary Clinton. The show seems to have gotten only a tiny number of views on Youtube but it trafficked much more widely on Facebook and other platforms. Read More
Just a little background on this evening’s events on the immigration front.
Tonight the White House released a maximal set of demands for any deal to make DACA permanent. In fact, at least as Democrats understand the term, Trump is no longer even offering that. For that President Trump says he must have his wall funding, a crackdown on ‘sanctuary cities’, and a number of wholesale changes to the rules of immigration policy, specifically a new merit-based approach to issuing Green Cards and a focus on ‘ability to assimilate.’ There are at least half a dozen demands that are non-starters for a broad majority of Democrats – particularly Senate Democrats, which is where Trump will need some Democratic votes.
It seems there’s no end to the public debate we can have about the relative weight of racism and authoritarianism that go into driving Donald Trump vs mere ego and narcissism, a grinding maw of appetite and self-gratification. Of course, we don’t really have to decide. It’s both. But today’s stunt does give us some reminder of the true pecking order. Read More
Matt Talhelm, a reporter at the NBC affiliate in Charlottesville, reported on twitter about a half hour ago that Richard Spencer and roughly three dozen supporters had returned with their torches to the Lee statute in Emancipation Park with chants of “We will be back.” They apparently left the park after a short protest and speech.
White nationalists now chanting – “We will be back”. About 3 dozen supporters in Emancipation Park. Plenty of police on standby in park. pic.twitter.com/LuJEsAgxQy
— Matt Talhelm (@MattTalhelm) October 7, 2017
One of the things I like about the kind of writing I do hear is that it is iterative rather than definitive. Points I was trying to make in one post, which remained fuzzy or tentative in my own mind, get sharped or reconsidered by things I read in your emails or by articles I read in other publications. On this latter front, I want to return to David Frum’s article I referenced yesterday. Read More
My post yesterday on data journalism and gun control touched off quite a stir and storm. I think there was some legitimate criticism of my broad brush criticism of data journalism, or at least the way my headline could be read that way. There’s a lot of great data journalism out there. My former colleague Al Shaw flagged just one example here.
It’s not all data journalism – which I stated explicitly. The problems I noted are not intrinsic to data journalism. But they are what I would call a natural and not uncommon shortcoming: When you have a hammer, everything seems to be a nail. This is as much a problem with more conventional narrative journalistic methods as with data journalism. When you have extreme confidence in the power of (and success with) data to clarify questions and reveal patterns, you can lose track of or give too little attention to whether the questions you’re asking are even the right ones to ask. Read More