The veteran Connecticut newspaper reporter, Steve Collins, who resigned his job over Adelson lackey’s Michael Schroeder’s effort to singlehandedly destroy the profession of journalism at The Bristol Press, inspires I.F. Stone’s son, Jeremy Stone, to create the I.F. Stone Whistle-Blower Award and make Collins the first recipient.
I’ve been ranting and cajoling for long enough about our annual Prime sign-up drive, that I wanted to share some great news: We made it. As I’ve shared with you, we started on September 21st kicking off our annual sign-up drive with a goal of signing up 3,000 new members. But it was more a private goal and it seemed hard to figure we could get to that number, even with a great response. But starting about a month, when we were at about 2200, it started to seem at least possible. And then at some point on Christmas Eve – appropriately enough – we got there. It is no promotional hyperbole to say that I really did not think we’d be able to get that number.
We’re currently at 3017 for the drive. And, yes, if you’d still like to sign up, by all means do so. But we set the goal and we got there so no more harping from me. Just to give you a bit more context, this put us at just below 9,500 Prime members – about 500 of whom are monthly subscribers and the remainder annual subscribers.
Let this be our Christmas story. Why? Well, that requires some explaining and perhaps even a stronger rationale than I’m yet able to muster. Because it has no cheer, redemption or family bonding. It’s about power, money, greed, recklessness and what can only be termed the sort of roughshod ridiculousness and surreal unintentional comedy that comes from being powerful enough or serving people with sufficient power that the ordinary sort of fear of getting caught and having to explain yourself simply doesn’t apply.
You probably heard sometime over the last couple weeks that there was a mystery brewing about the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The paper had been sold and for an oddly high price given the brutal economics of contemporary newspapering. The mystery was that no on knew who bought it. Indeed, even the people who run the paper were kept in the dark. Eventually, to no one’s great surprise, Sheldon Adelson was revealed, via a Connecticut cutout, as the buyer. Plutocrats have been buying papers since there were papers. And Adelson, in addition to being one of America’s top plutocrats, also makes his home in Las Vegas. So on various fronts, no terribly big surprise. But since vanity and influence are the usual reasons oligarchs buy newspapers, remaining anonymous is a bit hard to understand.
I wanted to discuss a couple questions I keep getting asked.
First, couldn’t Trump’s sky-high poll numbers just not pan out if he has no ground game in the early or even the primary states?
No, this is not the case.
I wanted to follow up on my overnight post noting that rapidly emerging “schlong” revisionist analysis of Donald Trump’s statement which now – a mere dozen hours later – has emerged into a full-fledged “schlong truth” movement. Trump himself is doubling down on “schlong” and has enlisted Jeff Greenfield who is vouching for the normalness and non-sexual meaning of the phrase. It was unclear to me at first from Greenfield’s tweet whether he was basing this on personal experience as a New York Trump contemporary (Greenfield is only slightly older than Trump but, according to Wikipedia, grew up in tonier Manhattan, not the outer boroughs or Long Island) or based on new research. But I got a reply from Greenfield below which clears up any question on that front.
Since our initial post we have had a number of TPM Readers (generally men born between 1940 and 1952 in Queens and Long Island) who have clear testimony about what we might call the “Trump/Schlong” usage (aging Jewish male readership finally comes in handy!).
I’m a bit out on a limb here. But I’ll keep the person’s identity a secret. So I hope I don’t get in too much trouble. An acquaintance of mine just wrote the following on Facebook …
Not to make too fine a point of it, but when I was growing up on Long Island, not too far from where Donald Trump grew up and around the same time, “shlonged” was a pretty commonplace verb meaning, roughly, “thoroughly defeated.” It had nothing to do, at least in the minds of anyone I knew, with the Yiddish noun shlong, meaning penis.
Maybe the etymological evolution of the verb is similar to the American slang word, “screwed,” meaning badly wounded, which has become so commonplace that it regularly appears in polite print even though the word’s slang usage is originally sexual.
Jim Newell has a good discussion here of why New Hampshire, which has sort of been in decline as a president-picker ever since Bill Clinton lost it and then won the presidency in 1992, could really end up being pivotal this year. The Iowa Republican party is very, very right-wing and more than a little weird. So it kind of makes sense that Cruz or Trump will win it. But it also kinda doesn’t matter since Iowa has a terrible history of picking presidents. Barack Obama is really the exception that proves the rule in recent history.
A few weeks ago I said that it actually seemed possible – not likely but possible – that we’d reach our goal of 3,000 new Prime members in our annual drive which ends on December 31st. Now I’m pretty confident that we will. We now need only 86 more sign ups by December 31st. That is definitely possible. So I’m posting this afternoon to ask you to help us get to that goal, which not far off at all. As I said a few days ago, from my experience, the biggest block for regular readers signing up for Prime is actually just that hassle of pulling out your credit card, typing in the number, the expiration date, the little security number and the rest. I feel like that way all the time. So if you’d like a cleaner, faster version of TPM and most importantly to support our independent journalism, I want to ask you to take a moment right now. Just … like literally right now, pull out your wallet and take the plunge. It’s a huge thing for us. If you’re ready, click right here.
And seriously, thank you.
So yesterday Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton going to the bathroom is “disgusting” and that she was knocked out of the 2008 primary race by an over-sized penis.
For my money, the comment about Hillary going to the bathroom is more offensive than “schlonged.” But obviously there’s plenty to choose from. Regardless, I’m sure the GOP operatives charged with winning the general in 2016 are just amazingly happy about this.