Normally when I’ve spoken of “press failure”, it’s a sharp indictment, one of various ways the political press has failed to probe deeply, challenge its own assumptions, resist being played by political actors and other vices. This is a bit different. The failure is great. But the causes and how to rectify it are a bit less clear. In this case I’m talking about the fact that the US press still seems to have very little ability to find out what President-Elect Trump is doing. Just as simple as that. The press is largely in the dark.
Apart from the question of its impact on the 2016, we now have confirmation of just how bad a decision, how unjustified a decision James Comey made when he rocked the presidential election a week before election day. Every bit as bad as you thought.
The following is from a former federal prosecutor with deep experience in public corruption investigations and prosecutions.
I’ve reviewed the redacted search warrant that the Court unsealed today.
I already realized that US Ambassador to Israel nominee David Friedman, in addition to supporting the worst and most violent elements in Israeli society, is in fact a terrible person. But I didn’t know how far he’d gone in prostituting the Holocaust in the service of his friend and client Donald Trump.
In his latest column in Haaretz column Peter Beinart digs up this quote ….
I already realized that US Ambassador to Israel nominee David Friedman, in addition to supporting the worst and most violent elements in Israeli society, is in fact a terrible person. But I didn’t know how far he’d gone in prostituting the Holocaust in the service of his friend and client Donald Trump.
In his latest column in Haaretz column Peter Beinart digs up this quote ….
We’ve just published the fourth installment of our four part series on the privatization movement. This final installment is on the educational testing industry: No Test Left Behind: How Pearson Made a Killing on the US Testing Craze. See the whole series here.
We’re incredibly proud of the whole package: it includes a great look at the ideological history of the privatization movement, another detailed feature on how the prison industry is about so much more than prisons and yet another on how so-called “public private partnerships” around making it impossible for many cities to govern themselves. We published most of this series prior to the election of President-Elect Trump. But all of it is even more newsworthy and pertinent in the coming Trump Era since Trump is investing heavily, both literally and in figurative political terms, in each of the drives for privatization described in this series.
TPM is pleased to announce the nominees for the Tenth Annual Golden Dukes Awards, celebrating the most surreal scandals in politics, absurd behavior and dubious claims that we all had the misfortune of witnessing in 2016.
The shocking assassination of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov today in Ankara, amidst a rising tide of global violence and instability, has pitched people’s thoughts to events in Sarajevo, 102 years ago, when the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the crown of Austria-Hungary, provided the trigger for World War I. Let me say, briefly, that I don’t think this is that kind of event. But one key to understanding why today’s assassination is not like that other assassination 102 years ago is realizing that our collective understanding of what happened during the so-called “July Crisis” of 1914 is basically wrong.
This latest is an almost comical instance of the flagrant corruption that will fill the next four years, or however long the Trump family holds on to the White House. Trump Organization staffers shook down the Kuwaiti Embassy to get it to move its business from the Four Seasons’ to the new Trump Hotel.
We’re learning a simple, structural reality of our government. The President runs the government. The Congress oversees the President. With carte blanche from Congress, the President can do virtually anything.
GOP Rep. suggests time he waited a day to seek medical care for son’s broken arm as inspiration for post-Obamcare world.
We are still collecting information on the assassination of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey. The first confirmation, just in in the last few moments, is that Ambassador Andrei Karlov has died of his wounds.