Tag Archives: Washington Post

What I Learned Over One Cup of Coffee Yesterday Morning

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I’m weak. All things considered it was a pleasant weekend up in northern Wisconsin. A bit mmm, “moist” on Saturday, but Friday and Sunday were crisp and sunny. Good weather for putting on storm windows, stockpiling firewood, enjoying a beverage around a bonfire.

So why did I spoil it all by checking out the latest news yesterday morning? Even if you’re not like me, someone who believes things will go quite badly tomorrow, no one in the reality-based world expects this next election to go well for the forces of sanity.

As proof, I give you these anecdotes gleaned over one … one … cup of coffee.

We begin with a few clips from a story by Ed Pilkington of The Guardian, covering an evangelical/MAGA bash in Branson, Missouri.– for which some of the faithful paid $500 a pop.

“There is a man by the name of Donald,” the voice on the recording says. “God said, ‘You have been determined through your prayers to influence this nation … I will open that door that you prayed about, and when it comes time for the election you will be elected.” Three thousand people are packed into an overflowing auditorium, many with arms raised and eyes closed in prayer. The recording to which they are listening is from April 2013 and of Kim Clement, a late South African preacher, as he prophesies the first coming of Donald Trump. In a clip from the following year, Clement again purports to channel the word of God: “Hear me, for I have found a man after my own heart and he is among you. He is one of the brothers, but singled out for presidency of the United States of America.”

And …

“They will hear the former president’s first national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is revered in this setting as ‘America’s general’, warning that a new world tyranny is approaching. They will listen as Mike Lindell, the so-called My Pillow Guy, launches an incoherent rant about how foreign forces are infiltrating voting machines and using them to subvert US elections. They will give a standing ovation to the beloved leader’s son, Eric Trump, who will fire them up almost to the point of ecstasy with talk of ‘doing it all again’. And at the end of the day more than 200 of them will line up by a swimming pool for a full-body immersive baptism in the name of the Lord, spiritual and political. The show is part Trump Stop the Steal rally, part charismatic religious service, part QAnon and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory all rolled into one. It also subscribes heavily to the church of merchandising – there is a large vendors’ tent with several stalls devoted to the peddling of snake oil (‘Redox Worx: patented cell-signalling technology. Improve health on a cellular level’).”

And …

“Twice the event has been shut down or forced to relocate, in New York and Washington states. Now when you are sent your ticket it is labelled as a ‘Fresh-roasted coffee-fest and expo’ to disguise the show’s real focus.”

And …

“We are ready to go to war with the enemy, to bring this country back,” Clark says as he orders the blowing of the shofar – horns seen as spiritual weapons that herald the unleashing of God’s power. [This heady brew is the creation of Clay Clark, a former wedding reception DJ from Oklahoma turned ThriveTimeShow podcaster who came to prominence protesting Covid lockdowns.]”

And …

” … speaker, Sherri Tenpenny, says that Covid vaccines were turning people into ‘transhumanist cyborgs’. Covid shots have killed 20 million people around the world and caused 20 billion injuries, she says.”

And … “It’s unthinkable what these people are doing to this nation,” [Eric Trump] says. “This is cognitive war, and I don’t say that lightly – I’m not, like, a tin-hat wearing guy.”

Then we have this from John Wagner at The Washington Post:

“Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) vowed Thursday that ‘not another penny’ of U.S. funding would be spent to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia if Republicans take control of Congress after the midterm elections. Greene spoke at a Save America rally in Sioux City, Iowa, staged by former president Donald Trump to boost Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), among others, on the ballot. ‘The only border they care about is Ukraine, not America’s southern border’, Greene said of Democrats. ‘Under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. Our country comes first. They don’t care about our border or our people.’ The view of Greene, a conservative firebrand prone to controversy, has become more prevalent with GOP ranks in recent months. … House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in an interview last month with Punchbowl News: ‘I think people are going to be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine’.”

And then this from Madeline Halpert for Forbes …

“Nearly half of Republicans think the U.S. is sending too much support to Ukraine as it battles Russia’s invasion, according to a new poll from the Wall Street Journal, a figure that has jumped in recent months, as some key GOP lawmakers threaten to cut back on U.S. aid to Ukraine.”

Combined with this from Steven Lee Myers at the New York Times …

“The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol. The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to support Ukraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine’s president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda. The fusion of political concerns was no coincidence. The account was previously linked to the same secretive Russian agency that interfered in the 2016 presidential election and again in 2020, the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, according to the cybersecurity group Recorded Future.”

And then as a capper, just to curdle the cream in your coffee …

” … the former president told rally attendees to expect an announcement ‘very, very soon’. ‘You’re gonna be surprised at how soon, but first, we have to win a historic victory for Republicans in November’, Trump said. Axios reported on Friday that Trump’s team is looking at November 14 as a possible date to formally announce his 2024 candidacy.”

In other words, by the time a freshly re-elected Marjorie Taylor Greene blows the shofar horn to summon the krakens of conservatism to wage holy war against all the woke liberals opposing the Russian liberation of Ukraine, the rock will have been rolled back and we will have already begun the two year march toward Second Coming of Donald, Our Savior.

Can I freshen your cup?

“How many of you believe that Jesus is king, and that Donald Trump is the president?” he asks. Almost every hand in the house shoots up.

How Did Local Media — or the Times or the Post — Know Scott Quiner Was Anywhere?

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First … my condolences to the family of Scott Quiner. No matter the circumstances, someone’s death, especially an entirely preventable death, is a sad occasion. That said, the telling and reporting on Mr. Quiner’s last days leaves several questions unanswered and a lot to be desired.

Quiner is the now nationally famous man from exurban Minneapolis who, unvaccinated by choice, contracted COVID in late October. He was hospitalized and intubated since early November before his wife sued to prevent Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids from disconnecting him. Then just last week, we’re told she flew him to “a hospital in Texas”. At that point her lawyer … told the press (which promptly reported) that though badly malnourished Quiner was once again responsive … before then relaying on that he died two days ago.

My issue with this story from the get-go was how we knew much of anything about what was really happening here?

Like every other hospital, Mercy in Coon Rapids, has laws and rules about disclosing patient information. So it has said little to nothing about Quiner’s condition or it’s reasons for planning to disconnect him … after two and a half months on a ventilator amid a new crush of COVID patients and a dire lack of ICU capacity for “normal” emergencies. (The average ICU stay is three days.)

Everything after that is the word of Mrs. Quiner or her attorney, including where exactly he was being treated in Texas … if anywhere.

This from a Jan. 17 Strib story, “Scott is now in a hospital in Texas getting critical care’, said Marjorie Holsten, a local attorney hired by Quiner’s wife, Anne. ‘The doctor said Scott was the most undernourished patient he has ever seen. The last update I got was yesterday afternoon after some tests had been run; all organs are working except his lungs’. Holsten did not name the Texas hospital.”

How do we know any of that is true and accurate?

What is known, but has only been hinted at, is that Mrs. Quiner — to her credit, some might say — played every card in her hand to get her husband treated as she saw proper. A January 14 Star Tribune story says, “Anne Quiner repeatedly had asked the hospital to try various treatments, including some that are not widely used. But the hospital refused, she said. ‘They basically said they have the authority to do this no matter what I say’, Anne Quiner said Thursday on the Stew Peters Show, a podcast that broadcasts from the Twin Cities and has been critical of COVID vaccines.”

” … has been critical of COVID vaccines.” Hmmm. That’s applying a very light hand to (yet another) MAGA-fueled podcaster regularly pumping out COVID misinformation and inflaming the ill-informed. Nor does it even hint at the barrage of outraged anti-Vaxxers, ivermectin enthusiasts and the conspiracy-deluded who, I’m told by a first-hand source, bombarded newsrooms across the Twin Cities demanding, you know, truth and justice for Scott Quiner. (As is so often the case, the callers, outraged at the lame stream media cover-up sounded as though they were reading from the same script.)

A New York Times story at least said this, “On Jan. 12, Ms. Quiner pleaded for a lawyer’s help on the ‘Stew Peters Show’, a podcast whose host has falsely called Covid vaccines ‘poisonous shots’ and given a platform to pandemic conspiracy theories.”

Want to know a bit more about Minnesota’s own Mr. Peters? Try reading this, and drop me a line if you can find where any Minnesota news outlet wrote a similar piece, or hell, has “reported” on Mr. Peters at all.

What this looks and sounds like, but has not been acknowledged by any news organization — that I have yet found — is that local newsrooms were badgered by political partisans into covering a story where by every plausible assumption the victim(s) — all adults — made conscious choices that resulted in severe illness, hospitalization (at staggering cost) and death. Moreover, the news organizations then relented, likely justifying coverage on the grounds that a judge issued a rare restraining order against a hospital.

But, I’m sorry, that is a long ways from telling the whole story of what went on with Scott Quiner. Nor does it explain why any news room would accept the word of the family’s lawyer in lieu of any verification that what she was saying was true.

Perhaps, the Strib and other local news rooms can explain how they verified Quiner had been flown anywhere? (The family raised roughly $40,000 via GoFundMe-style appeals.) Or that he was actually in a hospital or “care facility” in Texas and that his condition was improving … until, he died. Or, now that we’re told he died, will any of them follow up and seek a copy of the death certificate?

The Washington Post says, “Quiner died at the Houston hospital where he was flown for care during the legal battle, according to Marjorie Holsten, an attorney for the family. He remained on a ventilator at the time, Holsten said, but she declined to identify the facility or provide additional details on the circumstances of his death.“

Fear of pitchfork mobs, even in the form of a tidal wave of spittle-flecked raging via telephone, is a sad reality in modern newsrooms … so assert I. Would any of the same newsrooms care to dispute that they weren’t goaded/badgered/threatened into giving the Quiner story the coverage it got? And whether — or why they didn’t ask — the basic journalistic question of, “Where exactly is he now? So, you know, we can confirm what you’re telling us.”

An attorney refusing to supply “news basics” like that would, to my mind, mean putting the story on hold until she did, or it could be confirmed in some other way.

After that, let me suggest that there may be a “feature profile” on Stew Peters, who is clearly a local character with enough potency and influence to whip up sufficient anger that he manufactured soft, fundamentally sympathetic coverage in major media for a family that made a series of extremely bad choices, against all science and logic, and lost.

Do I Think Robert Kagan is Right? The Responsible Choice is Treating Him as Though He Is.

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Every few weeks one article or piece of punditry in the avalanche of expert bloviating hits a nerve and stands out, head and shoulders above the rest. Last week it was a long column by veteran neo-con warrior Robert Kagan, (i.e. anything but a hippie Socialist), in The Washington Post, titled “Our Constitutional Crisis is Already Here.”

It’s impact was obvious by the sheer number of mentions it got and reaction it provoked — and continued to provoke for days — from talking heads at CNN, MSNBC, PBS and other credible news organizations. The fact that it garnered responses — with multiple quotes — from other political outlets confirmed that Kagan had stuck a prod pretty deep into the collective consciousness.

If you haven’t already, you owe it to yourself to set aside 20 minutes and read the whole thing. Why? Because, as the reaction to it makes clear, Kagan is talking about something both immediate — as in right now and getting worse — and very scary.

The absolute minimalist gist of it is that while most of us have tried to enjoy a post-COVID summer and return to normalcy (it hasn’t worked out well), taken the kids out to overrun national parks and are now revved up for football season, the seditious actors who enabled Donald Trump through his reign of idiocracy, fomented and then denied the insurrection of January 6, are (very) actively at work on a more comprehensive, sophisticated plan/plot for 2022 and 2024 in particular.

Much of that has been said elsewhere, but Kagan went where others have not, by saying things like:

“What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments. This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements.”

And … ” … no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — ‘losers’, to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony.”

And … “Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. But these are normal people in the sense that they think and act as people have for centuries. They put their trust in family, tribe, religion and race. Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. That, too, is not unusual. What is unnatural is to value the rights of others who are unlike you as much as you value your own.”

And … ” … [in 2024] Trump would have advantages that he lacked in 2016 and 2020, including more loyal officials in state and local governments; the Republicans in Congress; and the backing of GOP donors, think tanks and journals of opinion. And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? On its current trajectory, the 2024 Republican Party will make the 2020 Republican Party seem positively defiant.”

It’s a very dystopian view, (much like Bart Gellman’s startling pre-election 2020 scenario in The Atlantic), and vividly imagined. Kagan asks why we would assume violence would not be a logical option were the 2024 election in dozens of states challenged and locked up for months in tortured Federalist Society-style arguments?

The people I think of as sanguine conventionalists, the musty, tradition-bound crowd who prefer to believe that even today Trumpism is a passing fad and that soon enough … one of these days … when he’s gone too far … adults will step in and stop the madness, simply block out Kagan’s view rather than fully considering everything already in motion at this moment.

I shouldn’t have to go through the long list of irrational, cult-like behavior erupting across the country. But when school districts are pleading for law enforcement or the National Guard to control school board meetings where Trump-ish partisans are brawling and throwing out death threats over “liberal” vaccines and masks, how difficult is it to imagine gun play as the next level down?

Video shows parents threaten experts over TN school mask rule | Charlotte Observer

Kagan points a damning finger at the precious few Republican “adults” who have taken the occasional defiant stand against Trump, Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse in particular. Neither he notes have dared risk anything more in the face of flagrant voter suppression and all the various attempts at election chicanery moving through state legislatures. (The adults in corporate America could be rolled in with Miutt and Sasse.)

People ask if I think Kagan is on to something or merely being hyperbolic?

I say that given just what we can see there’s no good reason to disagree with Kagan’s nightmarish vision. Human nature has a deep animalistic/atavistic component, an ugly, visceral response activated by a distorted sense of community. This is the heart of the Trump cult. It’s a cult that, as Kagan says, is intensely fearful and feels deeply threatened. Like a cornered animal you might say.

So fearful and so irrational that many are already at the point where to lose everything — their lives to a disease they could easily avoid, for example — is more appealing, seems braver, more patriotic and principled than accepting the traditional standards we used to live under.

So yeah, I think he’s on to something.

Why Is Florida At the Front Of the Pandemic Response Line?

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Sometimes, even the great Washington Post buries the lede.  Disguised in a terrific story with a bland headline that only a supply chain manager could love (“Desperate for medical equipment, states encounter a beleaguered national stockpile”) was this disturbing and fascinating pandemic response story: “Florida Is Only State to Receive Everything It Asked For” 

That’s the salient nugget Political Wire chose to highlight from the Post story, even though it was buried in paragraph twelve of the Post’s 2,500 word tome. Political wire got the headline prioritization right.

While the Post’s headline and lede didn’t promote the most ethically troubling part of its reporting, the three reporters who worked on the article, Amy Goldstein, Lena H. Sen, and Beth Reinhard, certainly did great reporting about the differences in how various states say they are being treated by Team Trump during the pandemic response. 

Beyond the widely publicized problems that hotspot states like New York and Washington have been having with the Trump Administration’s response, the Post piece documented how other states also are struggling due to lack of adequate federal help:

Democratic-leaning Massachusetts, which has had a serious outbreak in Boston, has received 17 percent of the protective gear it requested, according to state leaders. Maine requested a half-million N95 specialized protective masks and received 25,558 — about 5 percent of what it sought. The shipment delivered to Colorado — 49,000 N95 masks, 115,000 surgical masks and other supplies — would be “enough for only one full day of statewide operations,” Rep. Scott R. Tipton (R-Colo.) told the White House in a letter several days ago.

Florida has been an exception in its dealings with the stockpile: The state submitted a request on March 11 for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields and 238,000 gloves, among other supplies — and received a shipment with everything three days later, according to figures from the state’s Division of Emergency Management. It received an identical shipment on March 23, according to the division, and is awaiting a third.

“The governor has spoken to the president daily, and the entire congressional delegation has been working as one for the betterment of the state of Florida,” said Jared Moskowitz, the emergency management division’s director.”

“Florida has been an exception.” While my jaw dropped when I got to that part of the article, the Post shrugged it off:  “Anecdotally, there are wide differences, and they do not appear to follow discernible political or geographic lines.”

How about this for a potential “political line?” Unlike the underserved New York, Washington, Massachusetts, Colorado, and Maine, the fully served Florida is one of the six states widely considered a “battleground state” that will determine the outcome of Trump’s 2020 reelection bid.

“Those will be the six most critical states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin),” Paul Maslin, a longtime Democratic pollster who worked on the presidential campaigns of Jimmy Carter and Howard Dean, told Newsweek.

“There will be others that’ll be important in varying degrees,” he said, “but those will be ones we’ll ultimately look back on and say, ‘How many of them did Democrats win back and were they able to win enough to win the presidency?'”

Given Florida’s undeniable status as a crucial swing state in Trump’s 2020 Electoral College calculus, it’s critically important for any news publication to pose this very legitimate question:  Is lifesaving equipment being distributed based on patients’ needs or political needs?

I’m open to the possibility that there is an epidemiologically sound explanation for why Florida has been at the head of Team Trump’s pandemic response line, while bright blue hot-spot cities like Boston and New York City are not.  Skeptical, but open. But to ignore the obvious political angle, not pose that legitimate question to Trump officials, and bury the Florida exception in paragraph twelve is baffling.

What’s even more puzzling to me is why people like Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi apparently aren’t raising the same legitimate question. Because the reckless game Trump seems to be playing here is not just ethically untenable, it’s also politically perilous.

Yeah, Kids. It’s “Binary”. Sessions Lied Under Oath

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2This one is really simple. The top law enforcement official of the United States lied under oath. As all the cool kids are saying these days, “It’s binary.” Yes … or … no. Simple as it gets. No nuance required. And here, as regards Attorney General Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions the III of the great state of Alabama, the answer is unambiguously, “yes.”

So less than one day after the D.C. punditocracy was wetting itself over Donald Trump “pivoting” to Presidential, we’re whiplashed back into the real reality of, you know, what is really going on. And there’s no plausible equivocating that can be done here.

Sessions, one of the first-in-for-the-Donald members of Congress, and a constant presence throughout the sordid campaign, not only lied in his reply to a question from our own Al Franken, he “volunteered” the lie … abut something that he didn’t have to lie about. (Although the more his standing with the Senate Armed Services Committee is tossed up as an explanation for chatting up the Russian ambassador the more people are stopping to say, “Wait a minute. Chatting up foreign ambassadors is a function of the Foreign Relations Committee, not the one Sessions was on.”

The significance of last night’s news — from both The Washington Post (on Sessions and the Rooskies) and The New York Times (on several foreign governments offering confirmation of Trump associates meetings with Russians in Europe during the campaign) — is that Congressional Republicans are … this close … to the tipping point. The point at which the accumulation of suspicion and evidence is large they have no practical choice other than to agree to an “independent special prosecutor” to investigate — a la Ken Starr — anything and everything related to Trump and the Russians.

Who that special prosecutor would be, who appoints him/her and what level of subpoena power (i.e. into Trump’s taxes) they have remains to be … politicized to hell.

But for now, things are proceeding quite nicely, thank you.

Trump worshippers and toadies will kick up a lot of dust parsing the possible innocence of Sessions’ coziness with the Russian ambassador. But the, uh, unimpeachable fact is that he flat out lied … under oath … to Congress. Just as Bad Old Bill Clinton lied about “not having sex with that woman.” Only this time, we’re not talking about heavy-petting, sort-of-sex in the Oval Office. We’re talking about colluding with the United States’ primary foreign adversary to screw with a Presidential election. Republicans are going to have go deep doo-doo double secret probation tribal to make sex a bigger deal than this, and I have no doubt they will. But as they like to say down in ‘Bama, “That dog don’t hunt.”

Six weeks into the Trump era we’ve already reached the point of needing an extra-Congressional investigation of possibly treasonous activity. (“Treason” being another word that has lost most of its meaning as a result of the constant braying of tri-corner hat-wearing imbeciles.)

Not that I’m surprised, you understand. In fact what surprises me most about the way Sessions, Gen. Flynn before him and the whole Trump team has responded to “the Russian thing” is that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of these deep thinkers that it is the business of the NSA, the CIA, the DIA and on and on as well the MI5 in Britain and every other allied intelligence agency to monitor meetings and calls and communications with people close to Vladimir Putin. In fact … wait for it … it’s precisely what we pay billions of dollars a year for them to do.

So, I don’t know if, “Dem boys ain’t too bright” is another ol’ ‘Bama sayin’. But it sure fits this crowd.

It’s Time for the Press to Get Nefarious with Trump’s Taxes

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Last week the editor of The New York Times said he’s willing to risk jail to publish Donald Trump’s tax returns. Because he’s regarded as a serious guy in a serious job we should regard that as a serious promise. But it is also a call to hackers, IRS bureaucrats, former accountants and anyone else with access, legal or (more likely) nefarious, to do business with the grand Grey Lady on the single biggest untold story of this election.

the editor, Dean Baquet was at Harvard with Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, who was at first a bit tremulous about the idea of publishing a private citizen’s most comprehensive and revealing financial disclosure. I mean, people could get arrested! But as the conversation went on Baquet said, “[Trump’s] whole campaign is built on his success as a businessman and his wealth.” To which Woodward, perhaps steeping up his bravado said, “Some things you have to do. . . . This defines Donald Trump. . . . There’s a big hole here.”

Do you think? Trump’s appeal may be more rooted in his exploitation of age-old white grievance and resentments, but the “fact” he’s as rich as Croesus, or so he says, adds tremendously to the enthusiasm his various baskets have for him. Were he not living in a penthouse decorated in a style best described as “early Saddam Hussein” and not (currently) married to a former achitecture student-turned-bikini model and not fly around in his own 757, he’d be just another duck-tailed doofus gassing on at the 19th hole. But roll all that into one gaudy picture and you’ve got something that screams “Success!” to America’s perennially self-pitying white middle and lower classes.

Here, here, here and here are some good Trump tax-related stories based on what little can be discerned.

The ethical nut of this promise, this vow, from Baquet is that Trump has so blatantly and egregiously gamed the standard politician-journalism game that the only way to crack him is with what on the face of it is Edward Snowden-like criminality … and let the lawyers sort it out later, a la Daniel Ellsburg during the Vietnam war. And I believe he’s right.

Last Friday’s fiasco at Trump’s new hotel in D.C., where he played the national media for chumps by exploiting their live national coverage for an infomercial for the building goosed with a bunch of campaign-rally hosannahs from grizzled war vets before finally A: Conceding that Barack Obama was born in the USA, and then, B: Accusing Hillary Clinton of starting the whole racist birther BS, sent the press into a remarkable fury. Even CNN, directed by former “Today Show” exec Jeff Zucker, a guy who would stick viewers’ heads in a stopped-up cruise ship toilet knowing his target demo would watch it 24/7, expressed outrage over the incident.

Why, exactly, you ask? Certainly not because Friday was the first time Trump has “rick rolled” an audience. That’s SOP for the guy. The critical difference Friday was this: Trump made the assembled reporters and their colleagues and bosses back at the office look like fools. Or, chumps, as I say. Now, having juuuust a bit of experience with Le Grande Journalist Ego, reporters and editors are pretty thick-skinned about being called names — like “fool” and “chump” — but get really upset when someone shows a whole country how indisputably easy it is to make them look … well, foolish and chumpy.

So a guy the vast majority of the press regards as a fraud on one level or another plays them for a free commercial and makes them look ridiculous. What are they, can they do about it? The Times followed Friday’s fiasco with a “tough” analysis piece, saying, “He nurtured the conspiracy like a poisonous flower, watering and feeding it with an ardor that still baffles and embarrasses many around him. Mr. Trump called up like-minded sowers of the same corrosive rumor, asking them for advice on how to take a falsehood and make it mainstream in 2011, as he weighed his own run for the White House.”

But as most of the gamed-and-ridiculed press has come to understand, “tough” analyses, “strongly-worded” editorials and hour after hour of gob-smacked, incredulous talking heads are all gnat-bites on the hide of a creature long accustomed to nefarious behavior. None of it means anything, because none of it has any significant effect.

The only topic, the only single subject matter that carries any weight, that would pull down the (gold metallic micro-fibre) curtain and allow voters to see and assess Trump for what he really is are his tax returns. That is where The Story is, and pretty much everyone in the press, including FoxNews and Bretibart, knows it.

Which brings people like the editor of the New York Times and Bob Woodward — who’s colleague David Farenthold has fast-tracked himself to a Pulitzer for the most dogged and aggressive coverage of Trump’s finances — to say out loud 50 days before the election that the time is nigh for two wrongs to make a right. We are talking the Presidency of the United State here, not doping in pro sports or the machinations behind some gas pipeline.

If you’re going to break the rules you traditionally operate under — by soliciting, maybe even paying for Trump’s tax returns — you do it to properly, fully dissect a “non-traditional” (i.e. quite possibly criminal) candidate for the most influential office on the planet … and let the lawyers argue it out later.

And you do it now.

Rep. Ellison’s Ultimatum: Single Payer or Government Shutdown

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SatireSaint Paul, Minn. –U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.)  announced today that he is leading a progressive effort to shut down the federal government until a single payer health insurance system replaces the federal Affordable Care Act (ACA) passed in 2010, further complicating the federal budget impasse.

“The private insurance exchanges used in the ACA were never what progressives wanted, so ‘we the people’ have decided to make a principled stand against them,” said Ellison, Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  The Caucus has long advocated for a single payer system in which the government would fund and operate a single insurance pool for all Americans, similar to how Medicare has long been structured for older Americans.

Rep. Ellison’s rhetoric was eerily similar to that of his fellow House Republicans, who have pushed for replacing the Affordable Care Act with the status quo system.  Under the current system, 48 million Americans are uninsured and health costs are among the highest in the industrialized world.

Rep. Ellison said his caucus is pushing legislation authored by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) to essentially build on and expand the federal Medicare program.  Under the bill, all Americans would be guaranteed access to health care regardless of an ability to pay or pre-existing health conditions.

Just as Tea Party-backed House conservatives advocated in 2009 for preserving the status quo private health insurance system, House progressives pushed for a single payer approach in 2009. But neither side was able to muster sufficient votes to enact their preferred policy.

Still Ellison points to an Associated Press poll finding that 65% of Americans agree that “the United States should adopt a universal health insurance program in which everyone is covered under a program like Medicare that is run by the government and financed by taxpayers.”  Ellison also noted an NPR poll shows that 93 percent of Americans believe that the number of uninsured under the status quo system that the Republicans are fighting to preserve is a “serious problem.”

“When House Republicans finally agree to open up the government again, we’re going to shut it down if they don’t support our single payer approach,” Ellison said.  “House Republicans shut down the government to maintain a status quo insurance system that almost all Americans believe is a serious problem, so progressives can damn sure shut it down over something that two-thirds of Americans support.”

Rep. Ellison said he has offered to compromise with Republicans by offering to delay the implementation of the single payer system by a year.  Ellison has also offered to allow private insurers to sell Medigap-like supplemental health insurance plans.  However, Ellison says Republicans are refusing to even discuss compromise.

In a related development, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced that he would move to re-shut down the federal government if House Republican lawmakers didn’t pass his legislation to require background checks on people buying guns at gun shows or online.  A Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that 86% of Americans support such background checks.  Despite this overwhelming public support, Manchin’s bill was rejected by House Republicans in April 2013.  Manchin also demanded a new credenza for his office.

NOTE:  If it is not obvious to you, THIS IS SATIRE.  IT IS NOT A TRUE STORY. Representatives Ellison, Conyers, and Manchin are much too responsible to shutdown the government when they don’t get their way in the democratic process.

This post was featured in Politics in Minnesota’s Best of the Blogs and in MinnPost’s Blog Cabin.

Related post:  Bachmann Vindicated:  Industrialized Nations Continue Rush to Replicate U.S. Health Care System

– Loveland