All of a sudden in the journalism fraternity we’re hearing that Donald Trump is a liar and journalists should stop sugarcoating his lies. It’s not that he hasn’t been called out previously by members of the mainstream media. CNN pointed out at the beginning of January that he had told 1,950 lies before completing his first year in office. At the beginning of May, the fact-checker crew at The Washington Post calculated he had told 3,001 lies.
But those are summaries, and on a daily basis, it’s rare to see Trump flat-out called a liar at CNN, the Post or any of the other major media unless it’s in a clearly marked opinion piece. Instead, reporters and their editors who know the squatter in the White House doesn’t just constantly lie, but uses his dishonesty tactically, refuse to say when he does lie.
Matthew Iglesias at Vox writes The raging controversy over whether to call Trump’s lies “lies,” explained:
Even in a news analysis piece about Trump’s strategic promotion of conspiracy theories, the New York Times euphemistically referred to “unconfirmed accusations” rather than baseless conspiracy theories.
This preference for euphemism over straightforward language is silly, so it’s attracted considerable social media criticism. New York Times journalists, meanwhile, are fiercely loyal to one another in public. The institution is congenitally unwilling to accept any form of criticism. And so Times reporters have responded as they often do, not by engaging on the substance of the criticism but by questioning the critics’ motives. [...]
Yet the troubling thing about media coverage of Trump isn’t that the press has failed to label lies as lies once they are proven to be lies. It’s that these kinds of statements continue to be taken at face value when they are made, as if they were offered by a normal, reasonably honest person. But Trump is not a reasonably honest person. He is someone who flings around unconfirmed accusations and demonstrable falsehoods with abandon — and who does so, by his own admission, for calculated strategic purposes.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Call out his lies. He depends on them:
By now, we know that President Trump is a lying demagogue. Because this is not said often enough, he has been allowed to routinize lying and enshrine the vilest forms of divisiveness as a normal part of our politics.
Lies do not deserve deference just because a president tells them.
We thought that the media learned during Joseph R. McCarthy’s heyday that “We report the lies, you decide” is not a responsible approach to journalism. Trump’s egregiousness requires everyone to take a refresher course in the lesson of McCarthyism.
At the same time, just calling out deceit is insufficient. It is essential as well to understand why Trump tells particular lies at particular moments and to be hardheaded in judging how effective they are. This is a precondition to turning back the smears and the falsehoods.
Trump’s address Tuesday at a Nashville rally was a lollapalooza of deception. He kept the fact-checkers busy. PolitiFact raised doubts about 15 of his statements and flatly rated 10 of them as “mostly false,” “false” or “pants on fire.”
Bill McKibben at The Guardian writes—Say hello to Justin Trudeau, the world's newest oil executive:
In case anyone wondered, this is how the world ends: with the cutest, progressivest, boybandiest leader in the world going fully in the tank for the oil industry.
Justin Trudeau’s government announced on Tuesday that it would nationalize the Kinder Morgan pipeline running from the tar sands of Alberta to the tidewater of British Columbia. It will fork over at least $4.5bn in Canadian taxpayers’ money for the right to own a 60-year-old pipe that springs leaks regularly, and for the right to push through a second pipeline on the same route – a proposal that has provoked strong opposition.
That opposition has come from three main sources. First are many of Canada’s First Nations groups, who don’t want their land used for this purpose without their permission, and who fear the effects of oil spills on the oceans and forests they depend on. Second are the residents of Canada’s west coast, who don’t want hundreds of additional tankers plying the narrow inlets around Vancouver on the theory that eventually there’s going to be an oil spill. And third are climate scientists, who point out that even if Trudeau’s pipeline doesn’t spill oil into the ocean, it will spill carbon into the atmosphere.
Lots of carbon: Trudeau told oil executives last year that “no country would find 173bn barrels of oil in the ground and just leave it there”. That’s apparently how much he plans to dig up and burn – and if he’s successful, the one half of 1% of the planet that is Canadian will have awarded to itself almost one-third of the remaining carbon budget between us and the 1.5 degree rise in temperature the planet drew as a red line in Paris. [...]
Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—Ivanka Trump embodies her father's family values:
Trump has demonized migrants as violent criminals from the start of his presidential campaign. We’ve come to expect him to use these neo-Nazi tactics, to re-tweet actual neo-Nazis and to express his sympathies for neo-Nazis screaming for racial purity. As George W Bush never said, this hard bigotry has given us such low expectations.
But it hasn’t yet hardened us to the hollow hypocrisy of those claiming to support family friendly policies within Trump’s own family.
Chief among those is his daughter Ivanka, who styles herself on Twitter as a “wife, mother, sister, daughter” ahead of her job as a presidential adviser. Were it not for her father’s policies and repeated comments, it might be admirable that she has been an advocate for working mothers and paid family leave. We might just appreciate the cuteness of the family photo of her snuggling up to her young son.
Instead, she looks like she is either out of touch with her father’s policies, or out of the loop. There’s little point in advocating for families while your own administration is breaking them up intentionally as some kind of deterrent to immigration. Never mind that none of Ivanka’s policy proposals have made it into reality; she works inside an executive branch that is actively working against what she says she stands for.
Sarah Sunshine Manning is an enrolled member of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Idaho and Nevada, and a descendent of the Chippewa-Cree, and Hopi tribes. At TruthDig, she writes—Trump Says Settlers ‘Tamed a Continent.’ Now for Indigenous People's Side:
This knowledge seems rudimentary, and yet it’s not: The same ships that transported the “American dream” from 15th century Europe likewise delivered a nightmare to indigenous lands now known as America—a nightmare that would persist for centuries for millions of indigenous people, African slaves and their many descendants. But it was far beyond a nightmare. It all was callously and painfully real.
This knowledge also seems rudimentary, and yet it’s not: Indigenous communities today bear the stubborn scars and residual societal ills stemming directly from colonization: being dehumanized, disenfranchised and imprisoned in our own lands, confined to desolate reservations, and brutally ripped from the lifeways and teachings that sustained us for millennia.
Much that should be rudimentary knowledge has been flattened throughout American history by colonial apologists while the humanity of indigenous peoples has been routinely denied, our vast achievements and painful stories of near-annihilation squelched by whitewashed American narratives and a dehumanizing lexicon woven into the fabric of American consciousness: savage, redskin, squaw; uncivilized, Manifest Destiny, American dream. [...]
Trump’s remarks, true to white supremacy and American colonial form, hark back to the very first classifications of indigenous peoples as untamed savages.
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—Fears of the Next Recession:
Economists are worried about the future of the U.S. economy. That was the takeaway of a Reuters poll last week of more than 100 economists, who forecast a one-in-three chance that America would suffer another a U.S. recession within the next two years. “While predicting turning points in economic cycles is no easy task, the recovery from the devastating 2007-2009 financial crisis has been unusually lengthy,” Reuters reported, “and the latest poll showed some signs the current economic expansion will end soon.”
Reuters understates the matter: Economic predictions are no more reliable than Super Bowl ones. After all, those same economists predicting a recession also forecast an average of 2.8 percent growth in 2018, due to the Republican tax cuts passed late last year. But this much is certain: A recession in the next couple of years would be catastrophic for the many millions of Americans who haven’t recovered one bit since the last one.
The skyrocketing cost of gas, which hit a four-year high over Memorial Day weekend, isn’t helping matters. A political crisis in Venezuela has stalled virtually all oil production there, and oil traders are spooked by President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal: If the U.S. reimposes sanctions on the country, up to one million barrels per day would vanish from the global supply. Those factors, along with fears that Trump’s new national security team will create more tension in the Middle East, have caused the price of oil to rise by around 50 percent over the past year, peaking at $73 a barrel.
Oil price shocks historically have been a main cause of recessions.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—America’s Flooded Future: Why rain in the Northeastern United States is getting more intense and more destructive:
“Please don’t come to Ellicott City,” Baltimore Sun reporter Kevin Rector tweeted on Sunday, minutes after a powerful flash flood rocked the Baltimore suburb. In the course of about three hours, eight inches of rain gutted roads, smashed windows, felled buildings, and killed at least one person. Emergency crews searched submerged cars for trapped passengers; a bride and groom waded through floodwaters after being evacuated from their venue. “It is a disaster,” Rector wrote.
The meteorological probability of rain events like this are about 1 in 1000. (This doesn’t mean they always happen once every 1000 years; just that they have about a 0.1 percent chance of happening.) But Ellicott City’s last 1000-year flood was in 2016, when six inches of rain fell in two hours, killing two people. That such a major storm would hit the exact same location in two years “boils down to rotten luck,” wrote The Washington Post’s meteorologist Jeff Halverson. “Personally, I would not have expected to ‘relive’ (vicariously) such a devastating flood, in the same spot, over the course of my lifetime,” he said. “Yet, it happened. Sometimes lightning does strike twice.”
The lightning metaphor implies that the second flooding of Ellicott City in two years was only bad luck. But humans have increased the odds of such devastation, especially in the Northeastern United States. [...]
Steve Bullock, the Democratic governor of Montana, at USA Today writes—On guns, we're as paralyzed as I was the day my nephew was shot:
In the spring of 1994 I was pulled out of my last class before graduating from Columbia University School of Law. That afternoon I learned my 11-year old nephew had been shot and killed on a playground by another student in Butte, Montana. Jeremy Bullock was the unintended victim of what was, at the time, our nation’s youngest school yard shooting. I felt paralyzed.
Last fall on opening day of hunting season, my son shot his first deer. He was prepared. We practiced the fundamentals of fair chase and reinforced his hunter safety course. As it has been for generations of Montanans that came before, it was a moment he and I will never forget.
Both experiences shape my views of gun policy, as a policymaker and a parent. [...]
Let’s focus on what works. Most gun owners are law abiding, yet too often guns get into the wrong hands. That’s why the first step ought to be universal background checks and cracking down on straw purchases of guns.
The overwhelming majority of Americans support comprehensive background checks. We know in the 19 states that have enacted them they have reduced gun violence and saved lives: 47% fewer women are shot to death by intimate partners, 47% fewer suicides by gun, and 53% fewer law enforcement officers shot and killed in the line of duty.
The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times concludes—A loophole for dirty diesel trucks: Yet another attack on science by Trump’s EPA:
It's bad enough that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt wants to reopen a loophole that allows truckers to drive rebuilt rigs with dirty diesel engines that spew as much as 450 times more soot than new models. But now it turns out that Pruitt justified his plan with a questionable, company-funded study that is under investigation for "research misconduct." [...]
Pruitt has justified the rollback in part by citing a study from Tennessee Tech University that declared glider trucks to be no more harmful to air quality than trucks with new engines. Turns out the study was funded by Fitzgerald Glider Kits, which happens to be one of the primary manufacturers of glider trucks.
According to The Times' Evan Halper, the study was run by a Tennessee Tech vice president with no graduate-level engineering training, and the research was conducted at a Fitzgerald-owned facility. The owner of the company, Tommy Fitzgerald, hosted a campaign event in 2016 for then-candidate Donald Trump, and he has met privately with Pruitt. [...]
There's an extra special contradiction to Pruitt's embrace of the Tennessee Tech study. In the name of "transparency," Pruitt has proposed a rule requiring the EPA to consider only studies for which the underlying data are made public. The rule, which has been pushed by industry groups for years, would block the EPA from considering studies about the health impacts of pollutants that are based on the private medical records of individuals. But it could also apply to the questionable glider truck study because Fitzgerald's company is refusing to publicly release the full study, which it owns under its arrangement with the university.
Ashley Judd at Time magazine writes—What Harvey Weinstein's Arrest Does — And Doesn't — Change for the #MeToo Movement:
When the news broke that Harvey Weinstein would be surrendering himself on rape and sexual assault charges, I didn’t have a reaction. As I spoke with others for whom the ground was shaking I realized my feeling was that a sexual predator being legally accountable for criminal behavior is and should be normal, routine and not particularly newsworthy. And I also understood why it is thunderous news.
In fact, both reactions ring true. The criminal justice system should function efficiently and swiftly, apprehending and punishing any and all sexual predators, whatever their social status and power quotient. And in this moment, in this era, that a powerful man who thrived and flourished in a culture of impunity was arrested and charged is resoundingly significant. It is a watershed event, an irreversible pivot away from tacit and explicit license to exploit to a ground of firmer boundaries and clarity about intolerable behavior no longer being tolerated.
I was hopeful Harvey would plead guilty, that his surrender was volitional, so that in addition to carving out a singular position of disgrace, he could come forward as the predator who walks out of shame onto a new path of humility, introspection, accountability and amends, thereby leading our men and country in the necessary and inexorable of trajectory of restorative justice. It seems that Harvey, though, will not be the person to do that, as he is pleading not guilty and still maintains, in the face of so many accusations that all sex was consensual. Denial can stand for “I don’t even know I am lying,” and it appears that is where Harvey still lives.
Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine writes—The Gangster Morality of Anti-Anti-Trumpism:
After greeting Trump with near-uniform revulsion, conservative intellectuals have mostly swallowed their doubts and reconciled to the new party leader. Their predominant tone is not worshipful (as it was, for the most part, during the Bush administration) but resigned and cynical. Trump is a flawed man, they recognize, but they insist he is no different than any other powerful man. [...]
But the surrendering of any capacity to distinguish between ordinary political tactics and Trump’s extraordinary breaches of political norms collapses all standards. All that remains, in the absence of any principled distinctions, is raw power. The contest between a news media that tries to convey some version of objective reality and a president who willfully creates an alternative reality for his own ends is “just a war,” in [Ari] Fleischer’s revealing words. As [The Wall Street Journal columnist Holman] Jenkins puts it, “Every president has a duty to fight to protect himself and his power.” It follows that whichever steps Trump takes to maintain his power are implicitly normal and justified. This is the moral logic of a gangster, and also of the bulk of the ruling American political party.
Mark Trahant at Indian Country Today writes—#NativeVote18 Not just a political ad – Candidates are changing the very image of Native people on TV:
Here’s one way that Native politicians have already won this election: Stereotypes are shattered every time a campaign commercial is produced and aired on television or distributed online.
Native American images are mostly absent from commercial television and then when they do show up it’s the standard character list of drunks, beautiful maidens, stoic (or wise) warriors, and magical medicine men. [...]
That’s why political campaign commercials represent an entirely new discourse, one that gives viewers a richer, more complex account of contemporary Native people.
“My full name is Tatuye Topa Najin Win,” Tatewin Means writes in an open letter to South Dakota voters. “I am Sisitonwan Dakota, Oglala Lakota, and Ihanktonwan Nakota. My mother is Peggy Phelps, she is Sisitonwan Dakota. My father is the late Russell Means, he is Oglala Lakota, and Ihanktonwan Nakota.” [...]
But think about a general campaign and imagine the people of South Dakota consuming new kinds of Native American images. This is a story that will help them reimagine their own place in the world because they see a professional Native woman who is clearly qualified for the state’s top legal job. In fact, you could argue she’s more qualified because of life experiences and challenges that another South Dakotan could never have even imagined. Mind. Blown.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times concludes—If Addiction Is a Disease, Why Is Relapsing a Crime?
When Julie Eldred tested positive for fentanyl in 2016, 11 days into her probation for a larceny charge, she was sent to jail. Such outcomes are typical in the American criminal justice system, even though, as Ms. Eldred’s lawyer has argued, ordering a drug addict to abstain from drug use is tantamount to mandating a medical outcome — because addiction is a brain disease, and relapsing is a symptom of it.
Ms. Eldred’s case, now before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, has the potential to usher in a welcome change to drug control policies across the country. The case challenges the practice of requiring people with substance use disorders to remain drug-free as a condition of probation for drug-related offenses, and of sending offenders to jail when they relapse.
The prosecution’s counterargument — that the disease model of addiction is far from settled science — is weak. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, the American Medical Association and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is the final authority on psychiatric conditions that qualify for insurance reimbursement, all define addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disorder that, like diabetes and heart disease, is caused by a combination of behavioral, environmental and biological forces.
The prosecution’s argument is also somewhat beside the point, because it is clear that relapses are common in people struggling to overcome addiction, whether one considers it a disease or not; specialists say that most opioid addicts relapse an average of five to six times before achieving full sobriety.
Josh Fruhlinger at The Baffler writes—The Clown Prince: The blank stare and conspicuous combover are only two of Jared Kushner's fine qualities:
The Devil’s Building. What is there to say about Jared Kushner’s Trump administration triumphs? The country’s been transfixed, ever since his wife’s dad became president, by the adventures of “America’s Sweetheart,” as he leverages his power to solve all the world’s problems (see BONUS below) and defeat his internal White House enemies like Steve Bannon (TKO) and John Kelly (victory pending). But what about the man behind the legend? What events forged Jared into the savvy operator we know and love today? Does he thirst for revenge in his dark heart? Let’s find out!
Does Jared’s family have a dark past? Indeed it does! Jared’s billionaire real estate mogul father Charles was once, as the New York Times breathlessly reported as recently as the mid-George W. Bush administration, “one of the top Democratic donors in the country.” Also he’s a criminal, and a terrible human being! The problems started when he got caught donating money to campaigns in his business partners’ names without asking them, then escalated into a scandal involving tax evasion and witness tampering. Even aficionados of New Jersey political chaos might not remember this particular episode because it was eclipsed by Kushner ally Governor Jim McGreevy coming out of the closet and quitting in disgrace. But McGreevy’s rumored MMF post-TGIF threeways pale in comparison to the worst of Kushner pere’s crimes: hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, who was letting the feds know about the family’s improprieties, and then recording the assignation and sending the tapes to his sister.
McGreevy went to seminary to become an Episcopal priest (the Episcopal church said no to McGreevy’s priesthood quest) and Kushner went to a federal prison in Alabama. The prosecutor who put Kushner there was none other than U.S. Attorney Chris Christie; Christie would of course go on to become Governor of New Jersey himself, and, despite his early loyalty to Trump, found himself summarily fired from the Trump transition team by Jared in an act of unapologetic revenge for prosecuting Charles Kushner for all the crimes he committed. [...]