Last night I noted the Miami Herald report which made it pretty clear that John Kelly had gotten his facts very wrong in his attack on Rep. Wilson’s comments at that FBI building dedication ceremony back in 2015. But they couldn’t get the actual video. Well, now the Sun-Sentinel has the video. Read More
Today White House Press Briefing may turn out to be uglier than yesterday’s. Sarah Sanders just doubled down on the phony FBI building story, claimed Wilson said the really bad things off camera and then it was “highly inappropriate” to get into a “debate” with a Marine 4 Star General.
“If you want to go after General Kelly that’s up to you but i think that that … if you want to get into a debate with a Four Star Marine General I think that that’s something highly inappropriate.”
Huckabee doubles down on the lies and says it's "highly inappropriate" to disagree with a Marine 4 Star General. pic.twitter.com/OiVHSeHP1d
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 20, 2017
Episode 24 of The Josh Marshall Show (sub req): I talk to author Frank Foer about his new book “World Without Mind”, how big tech is changing the nature of our lives and our understanding of who we are.
This is amazing, comical, sad. From Roll Call …
In the hours after President Donald Trump said on an Oct. 17 radio broadcast that he had contacted nearly every family that had lost a military servicemember this year, the White House was hustling to learn from the Pentagon the identities and contact information for those families, according to an internal Defense Department email.
The email exchange, which has not been previously reported, shows that senior White House aides were aware on the day the president made the statement that it was not accurate — but that they should try to make it accurate as soon as possible, given the gathering controversy.
Col. Jack Jacobs, a medal of honor recipient himself, says Gen. John Kelly should simply apologize. More broadly, I thought this brief discussion from him is a good meditation on the moral sewer of Trumpism and even more, Donald Trump himself. He damages and diminishes everyone.
Col. Jack Jacobs says Gen Kelly should just apologize. An interesting meditation on the moral sewer of Trumpism and how it damages us all. pic.twitter.com/uKttv6O7kx
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 21, 2017
I noted yesterday this great piece of reporting by Roll Call which essentially showed that the White House knew the President was lying from beginning about his claims about calling bereaved families. They then scrambled to get names and contact information from the Pentagon to retroactively make the President’s claims ‘true’ as soon as possible.
Now we have some good follow-on reporting from The Atlantic, showing how the White House started express shipping condolence letters as the crazy week of lies, disgrace and nonsense unfolded. Read More
Apple is in the process of introducing a series of features (or perhaps better to say, restrictions) to its Safari browser, along with the new version of its operating system OSX High Sierra, which promise to put serious obstacles in the way of advertisers tracking you across the web. There are countless ways this happens. But you see it most clearly when you go check out a new suitcase to purchase at some online vendor and then see suitcase ads following you around the web. Some people find this creepy and annoying. Others find it amusing and don’t care. Probably few consumers would mind seeing it go. But there’s some deeper stuff going on. Read More
Brad Parscale is going to be interviewed tomorrow by the House Intelligence committee. He was the Trump campaign’s Digital Director. I’ve long been highly suspicious of his role in the Trump campaign. Read More
The sourcing on this seems somewhat opaque. But Mashable is reporting that Facebook is testing a new system which would remove publishers from your Facebook timeline unless the publishers pay Facebook. This, frankly, doesn’t terribly surprise me. It’s how monopolies operate. Read More
As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, authoritarianism and illiberalism are not new to American politics. Nor do we have to focus on the fact that for almost the first century of our history a substantial percentage of the country’s population was owned as property and were believed to have, as the Chief Justice of the United States put it, “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” There was also a pronounced anti-democratic turn in American politics in the late 19th century; there were various political movements in the US in the early part of the century which qualify, both on the right and left; even our language of illiberal extremism remains largely defined by Richard J. Hofstadter’s 1964 essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics.’
None of this is new. Read More