I knew I remembered the name …
You’ve now heard about Joseph Schmitz, the Trump foreign policy advisor – one of five – who is now accused of making anti-Semitic remarks as a Pentagon employee a decade ago. Well, these claims are fairly credible since Schmitz grew up in a household of a notorious anti-Semite and racist. McClatchy lightly references some off color remarks about Jews from Schmitz’s father. But the full force of the background isn’t really noted. Rep. John G. Schmitz had the rare and almost comical distinction of being expelled from the John Birch Society for being too extreme, racist and anti-semitic. Yes, you read that right.
You may have seen the news that just two days after the auction sale of Gawker Media in bankruptcy, the company’s flagship site itself announced it will cease operations next week. That’s jarring news on many fronts. I discussed some of them here in Tuesday’s post about the importance of independent media. But there’s another aspect of this that’s worth addressing.
First, let me say I don’t know really anything about Gawker’s internal revenue data. So as it applies to Gawker, what I’m about to write is just an educated hunch. But in general terms what I’m going to describe is definitely true. I know it from long experience in the industry. And it’s worth knowing as a reader as you think about media, why publications you read do what they do and so forth.
With today’s big news that the Justice Department that its ending its use of private prisons, I wanted to re-up our break out story on the private prisons industry. A great piece on an important topic.
A GOP memo to Republican members of all the county election boards in North Carolina, obtained by the Raleigh News and Observer via a public records request, reveals everything you suspected about GOP motivations in pushing for voting restrictions, including voter ID laws. It’s not surprising, but it should still shock the conscience. Give this a read.
Vin Weber talked to TPM’s Lauren Fox about the Trump campaign “shake-up” and captures where things stands today: “Look, we are in a terrible position. The Republican Party has made a mistake of historic proportion and when you do that, you find yourself in a place with no good solutions.”
A few days ago the Trump camp started pushing the idea that Hillary Clinton was “America’s Merkel”, a reference to longserving German Chancellor Angela Merkel, by many measures one of the more successful European politicians of the post-war era. Trump even personally started pushing the Twitter hashtag “#AmericasMerkel. When I started seeing this my first thought was, “How many Americans do they think have even heard of Angela Merkel, let alone see her as some awful figure in a way that tying her to Clinton would send chills down people’s spines?” For better or worse, Putin is super high profile. Netanyahu is high profile. For your average American? Merkel is not high profile.