Okay, I was up pretty late last night working on a post about Manafort, Ukraine, efforts to launder pilfered money out of Ukraine and into US real estate. But it’s all pretty incendiary and I was trying to piece it all together and figured … you know, I need to sleep on this and go over it again in the morning. Now, alas, probably seeming a lot less prescient and ahead of the news since we just heard a few minutes ago that Manafort has resigned from the Trump campaign. So thanks, dude. Thanks a lot. You could have waited a few more hours.
Journalists of all ideological stripes, from all places on the journalistic firmament, can be irredeemable sleaze balls. Bad behavior knows no political complexion or business model complexion. Believe me, I’ve seen a lot. But this story from Hunter Walker, one-time TPMer now with Yahoo Politics, illustrates something rather deep into the Breitbartian stream of right-wing journalism. It’s journalism not as journalism but a sort of cartoonish ideological info-warfare, intermixed with various personal vendettas and generalized nonsense. If that sounds like a good match for the Trump campaign it is. But let’s stick to the matter at hand, the topic of Hunter’s article.
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.”