Category Archives: Grey Lady

Look at everything Trumpie accomplished in just his first year in office

The New York Times editorial board features a hard-hitting interactive timeline, apparently published in July 2024, of everything the Orange Menace accomplished in just his first year as wannabe dictator from day one.  The report goes through all four action packed years of fighting and lying like hell. A hard-hitting recitation of facts from the newspaper whose spokespeople over and over claim the Grey Lady refuses to get involved in “politics”… The first year by itself is very impressive. Click the image below for the show.

“Fun” fact:  More Americans died in Trump’s beautiful lovefest/January 6th Capitol riot, at the hands of their fellow Americans, than died in Benghazi, at the hands of enraged Libyans, an event weaponized against then Secretary of State H. Clinton to the eternal fury of the American right.  

Here’s an angry patriot, in Bayside, New York, standing under his Trump’s God, America, Freedom flag, with a t-shirt reminding Americans of those killed in Benghazi.

Don’t tread on me, bro

Attack, deny, lie, declare victory when you lose

The corporate media, a machine to normalize the psychopathy of the powerful, it seems lately, is routinely nonchalant about things that should have the citizens in an uproar. At the time, during the Mueller investigation, there was almost nothing in the news about this game changing “fuck you” from a sitting president. I had to read Trump’s interrogatory answers myself to learn that he had flatly refused to answer Robert Mueller’s final, most incriminating, question.

A Republican Assistant Attorney General appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller (witch hunter number one) after Trump fired FBI director James Comey for insufficient loyalty when he would not drop an investigation into crimes committed by former Trump national security advisor General Michael “Q-Anon” Flynn. As part of his investigation into the Trump campaign’s many ties with Putin, Mueller wanted to ask Trump questions in person. Trump publicly bragged that he would sit down with that witch hunting traitor fuck any time, that he had no fear and nothing to hide.

It turns out he had plenty to hide and feared a “perjury trap” and so his lawyers negotiated an alternative, he’d answer written questions under oath. His lawyers wrote evasive answers throughout (which he bragged about writing himself) and then, for the final question, a compound question involving Flynn and others at the heart of the 140 documented acts of collusion (not indictable criminal conspiracy, since much evidence had been destroyed and witnesses dummied up) with Putin, Trump wrote . . .

. . . Nothing. . .

The thought that we are twenty odd days out from an election in which these unaccountable criminals, grifters and violent extremists may well be able to pull off the crime they attempted in 2020, stealing a “rigged” election by chicanery, brazen lies and violence, sickens me to my heart. If this fascist coup comes about, on my way to prison, or worse, I will be cursing the fucking New York Times. How hard is it not to be a well-respected equivocating mouthpiece for Nazis?

The Grey Lady, late to the party and weak

It was big news across the nonauthoritarian-leaning side of the internet the other day when the NY Times finally published an article about the many signs of Trump’s seeming mental decline (not to mention his blooming psychopathy) and his apparent unfitness for office, headlined:

Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age

With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president’s speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years.

Fair enough, as far as they go in their detailed chronicle of his more and more demented statements as he campaigns to become president again, presumably by a combination of voter suppression, a surgically precise, razor-thin Electoral College win, strategic support from a corrupt and incompetent postmaster general, various MAGA election officials, MAGA state legislatures and MAGA state courts, his friends in Congress, The Heritage Foundation, The Federalist Society, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Robert Mercer, Ginni Thomas, General Flynn, Q, X, a corrupt 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court and, in a pinch, an army of angry low flying monkeys desperate to avenge the Confederacy’s inglorious military loss in 1865. 

The Grey Lady steers gracefully clear of violating anything like the sacred Goldwater Rule (no public comment on elected official’s dangerousness by mental health experts unless the elected psychopath in question agrees to be publicly psychoanalyzed) [1]. It quotes several who know the Republican candidate well and appear to think he’s just fine.

The Grey Lady also does not comment directly about how increasingly insane his rantings are. They simply provide many examples so an intelligent reader can draw the inference, if they so choose, that the man who says these things is dangerously insane, rather than a serious world leader for this perilous moment in human history. The Grey Lady seems to tastefully avoid (she’s nothing if not tasteful) the most hateful and violence-inspiring things trump constantly spews. Then she muses:

The former president has not been hobbled politically by his age as much as Mr. Biden was, in part because the incumbent comes across as physically frail while Mr. Trump still exudes energy. But his campaign has refused to release medical records, instead simply pointing to a one-page letter released in July by his former White House doctor reporting that Mr. Trump was “doing well” after being grazed by a bullet in an assassination attempt.

Yo, Grey Lady, you leave out an obvious and immense part of why Biden was hobbled by fears about his age and you sell your influence short. Former president trump’s mental capacity was never written about negatively in the news section of the paper, as Joe Biden’s was, hundreds of times on the front page of the NY Times. Joe Biden’s every stutter and misstatement was amplified and questioned, his fitness for office constantly questioned, in news reports and editorials. Trump’s clear cognitive decline has been tastefully not spoken of (on the rationale that him being an inanely riffing, opinionated, fact-free asshole is not news) while the Grey Lady’s scrutiny of every Biden gaffe, stutter and misstatement was a major factor in Biden being forced to abandon his candidacy after a highly accomplished presidency.

One more, then you can go read the catalogue of trump’s idiocy yourself, at this gift link.

A 2022 study by a pair of University of Montana scholars found that Mr. Trump’s speech complexity was significantly lower than that of the average president over American history. (So was Mr. Biden’s.) The Times analysis found that Mr. Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level, lower than rivals like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who speaks at an eighth-grade level, which is roughly average for modern presidents.

It’s a tic, I suppose, to miss no opportunity to prove their unflinching fairness by once again pointing out that Biden too is, vocabulary and speech-complexity-wise, unfit for the presidency.

Are you smarter than a fourth grader? If so, read the NY Times with a critical eye for these fucking tics. The Grey Lady is all atwitch in these twitch-worthy times.

[1] OK, can’t resist one more. Note the Grey Lady’s lack of specificity, or an embedded link, in its reference to the recent conference of an anonymous group of mental health, national security and political experts whose 2017 New York Times bestseller the New York Times (in conjunction with the American Psychiatric Association,) successfully removed from public discussion during the trump presidency (and since):

Polls show that a majority of Americans believe he is too old to be president, and his critics have been trying to focus attention on that. A group of mental health, national security and political experts held a conference at the National Press Club in Washington last month on Mr. Trump’s fitness. The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group of former Republicans, regularly taunts him with ads like one calling his debate with Ms. Harris “a cognitive test” that he failed.

Debunking just one MAGA lie

As MAGA prepares to once again fight like hell (or they won’t have a country anymore) their lawyers have filed dozens of election challenge cases already [1]. As their ilk does for every other lost cause or lie, they have a simple (if false) answer about all those court cases they lost last time:

All MAGA election-related cases were dismissed not on the merits, but on procedural grounds, like lack of standing.

Even if this were true — it is not — lack of standing is a fatal flaw in a lawsuit, as is failure to state a legally coherent complaint (supported by evidence). In order to win a case a party must have standing — an actual provable injury the court can address — in order to proceed.

The scumbag Attorney General of Texas brought a case to the Supreme Court, signed on to by legal eagle MAGA Mike Johnson and more than a hundred MAGA legislators, seeking to overturn voting results in several states Trump lost in 2020. Even the MAGA Six had to acknowledge that Texas had no standing to bring this case limiting what other states could do. Nor did any of the loyal legislators, led by MAGA Mike Johnson, who signed on to the law suit to do their master’s bidding, have even the remotest theory of standing to act as “friends of the court”.

It is easy to forget the hundred plus lawsuits the RNC and Trump brought prior to the 2020 election, to try to suppress voting by Democrats. Take the sickening, desperate case of Trump v. Boockvar in Pennsylvania. In that case Trump 2020 and the RNC cited purely speculative harms they might have suffered if absentee voting was allowed to take place as planned during the peak of the pandemic. They laid out for the court the specter of theoretical, massive fraud never remotely seen in US elections.

They submitted no evidence to support their claim (there was none), yet the judge, a Trump appointee from the Federalist Society list, did not dismiss the case. He ordered them to produce evidence. They produced a big box of printouts and screen shots from Fox, Breitbart, Der Sturmer, Die Volkischer Beobachter, The New York Post, OANN, “evidence” the judge eventually detailed and dismissed. I followed the case on the electronic docket, one of more than 100 frivolous cases the litigious fucks filed before the 2020 election. Nobody was reporting on these cases and it was aggravating to me at the time.

In the end, I was relieved that the young federal judge, J. Nicholas Ranjan, not only dismissed the case in the end, but took an additional hundred pages to make his dismissal appeal proof. You can read about his dismissal of the case here.

It’s always war to the death with Nazi fucks like these. The SS continued fighting to the death while Hitler was in the bunker, raging and getting ready to shoot his beloved German Shepard. Let’s hope today’s fight to the death continues to remain more figurative than literal and that more Ranjan-like holdings are written by defenders of our constitutional democracy.

perfect shot ear, perfect!

[1]

The R.N.C. is leading a broad network of conservative legal groups in the effort. Mr. Trump’s allies, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, took over the committee last March, placing Ms. Bresso in charge of the legal operation and promising a more aggressive strategy. After the 2020 election, the party’s lawyers had at times refused to participate in Mr. Trump’s legal campaign, forcing him to rely on a collection of outsiders who filed cases rife with errors and false claims. Several Trump lawyers have since been criminally charged.

Among them is Christina Bobb, who is now senior counsel on the R.N.C.’s election integrity team. Ms. Bobb recently suggested that she was braced for more litigation after Election Day.

“I’m kind of holding my breath for that,” she said on a recent podcast. “I think we’re in probably, at least litigation-wise, as good of a place as we can be before the election.”

(NYT link above)

Brave stance by the Grey Lady!

Arguably, this NY Times editorial board piece savaging Trump’s unfitness for office, in the words of those who know him best (Bill Barr, Betsy DeVos, Sean Spicer, Mike Pompeo, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and company), does not square with A.G. Sulzberger, the 44 year-old CEO of the family business’s idiotic formulation that “politics” and “objective reporting” do not mix, but it’s something, I suppose.

The Dangers of Donald Trump from those who know him

Here’s what Sulzberger, whose father passed the CEO crown to him a few years back, had to say about the insurmountable difficulty of a free press reporting honestly on “politics”:

In a recent guest essay for the rival Washington Post, Times CEO A.G. Sulzberger exemplified this stubborn tendency. After acknowledging the danger Trump poses to the nation and the media itself, Sulzberger straw-manned his critics with the following caricature. “As someone who strongly believes in the foundational importance of journalistic independence, I have no interest in wading into politics,” he wrote. “I disagree with those who have suggested that the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.”

[I wasn’t able to find where I originally clipped this from, most likely suspects Heather Cox Richardson or Allison Gil)

AG Sulzberger strongly disagrees with those who “suggest” an enraged, incurious maniac like Trump is intent on suppressing all dissent, including the independent press, even if Trump himself is the one “suggesting it” (when he’s back in power he’ll pull the license of those commies at NBC after he won the rigged debate and they kept calling him a liar).

All I can really say to this strawman punching, issue obfuscating, 200 front page articles calling Biden’s cognitive abilities into question publishing, “foundational importance of journalistic independence” spouting CEO gasbag, and his September 5 op ed in the Washington Post is, go take a flying fuck at a rolling, apolitical, donut, bro.

Don’t forget John Roberts

From Heather Cox Richardson yesterday, on the long judicial coup run by the cunning, privileged owners of the activist extremist party that is now calling itself MAGA (see, also John Birch Society):

In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” 

That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.

McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate. . .

She then details McConnell’s right-wing judiciary appointment mission, and how he removed the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, when the time was right, to get a couple of 50% supported nominees on to the court, after denying Obama his constitutional right to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia eight months before the 2016 election.

. . . Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.

Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion. 

source

Don’t forget America’s most partisan balls and strikes umpire John “Corporations get to say ‘go fuck yourself'” Roberts. How does this smiling corporate shill, who schemes behind the scenes, votes in every key case with the right-wing fraternal order of the Federalist Society block, and has authored some of its most infamous decisions, get a pass from even someone as brilliant as Heather? How is he, the man who, although he didn’t vote with the other four to kill Roe v. Wade, gleefully signed on to nullify the power of federal regulators, keep an insurrectionist on the ballot in Colorado and immunize criminal acts committed by a criminal president, among other MAGA endorsed rulings, still seen as somehow “moderate” or an “institutionalist”?

Look no further than his infamous decision in Shelby County v. Holder when he ruled that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, which he acknowledged righted a historical injustice, was no longer necessary. His argument is bland and pristine: Congress relied on forty year old data when they reauthorized it, so me and four Federalist Society diehards are undoing their uninformed, undemocratic activism. True, except that he was lying about the forty year old data, as it turns out. As I wrote when I read the decision:

Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush signed the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes:

recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.” 

Nah, says John Roberts, we’re going back to that golden time when the wealthy land owners, the ancestors of our greatest billionaire donors and close friends, made all the decisions for the USA.  Dignity and respect, after all, are just words, and ridiculous ones when applied to those who deserve neither. Strike three, bitches.

I began writing this yesterday, and today the Gray Lady herself chimes in on Roberts. Here’s how he teed up the question posed by the Roberts court in Trump v. US:

The justices instructed lawyers from both sides to address a broad question: “whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure.”. . .

. . . On April 25, the justices and the lawyers in the case gathered for oral arguments in the courtroom, across the street from where the Jan. 6 rioting had taken place three years earlier. The clamor from the Capitol attack had been audible from inside the court building, former employees recalled in interviews, and afterward, security sharply increased and fences shielded the building.

During the arguments, however, several conservative justices said that they wanted to focus not on what had happened that day, but on broader legal questions.

“I’m not discussing the particular facts of this case,” Justice Alito told the courtroom.

“I’m not focused on the here and now of this case,” Justice Kavanaugh said. “I’m very concerned about the future.”

“We’re writing a rule for the ages,” Justice Gorsuch said.

For the Thousand Year Reich, no doubt.

Here’s a bit about Roberts’s fundamental dishonesty:

One footnote left scholars wondering whether former presidents could ever be prosecuted for taking bribes. An N.Y.U. professor was startled to discover that the opinion, which leaned heavily on Nixon v. Fitzgerald, a 1982 case on presidential immunity, truncated a quote from that decision, changing its meaning.

Verdict: Federalist Society stalwart and Nazi fuck.

In an otherwise fair account of takeaways from the recent presidential debate about pet eating

Among a panel of fourteen writers assembled by the Times to opine about who won the debate thirteen of them call it clearly for Harris. The following throw away line was embedded in another headline article, their six takeaways from the debate:

In her response, Ms. Harris bored into Mr. Trump’s agenda rather than her own. It was typical of a debate in which she appeared most at ease talking about Mr. Trump rather than fleshing out her own plans for the presidency.

In other words, from the Grey Lady’s perspective, Harris, in her two minute answers, during which her main job was driving home the contrast between herself and the insane idiot behind the other podium, an idiot with a detailed plan, written for him, for unaccountable oligarchs to take over our government forever, kept focusing on the psychopathy and danger Mr. Trump displayed in his lying non-answers rather than giving wonkish details of her own policies. Fair enough. . .

Corporate media truly, truly can’t help themselves. Heaven help us all.

NY Times “sane washing” Trump

For the Times writing “what Trump seems to be saying….”, after giving an extended section of an incoherent statement by the Orange Polyp, is not a problem. The New York Times always exerts itself to interpret and explain the nonsensical non-answers that Trump always gets a pass for. Lawrence O’Donnell’s analysis of the media “sane washing” Trump’s raging incoherence is precise and brilliant.

O’Donnell applauds the New York Times for trying, for the first time, to stop sane washing Trump’s dangerous blathering. Then he points out that they just can’t help themselves, reading this section of the paper’s lead article focusing on concerns about Trump’s age and cognitive abilities (the article, which I saw online in the wee hours this morning, was gone from the homepage when I woke up, maybe somebody at the Times is watching O’Donnell’s show):

Mr. Trump’s response to the child care question in New York on Thursday underscored the concerns. Often his mangled statements are summarized in news accounts in ways that do not give the full picture of how baffling they can be. Quoting them at length, though, can provide additional context. Here is a more extended account of his reply on affordable child care:

“It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about that — because the child care is, child care, it’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.”

“What he seemed to be saying was that he would raise so much money by imposing tariffs on imported goods that the country could use the proceeds to pay for child care. In itself, that would be a disputable policy assumption.”

source

In spite of reflexively “sane washing” Trump’s incomprehensible word salads and most dangerous threats in headlines and news articles every day, the New York Times editors do actually know the truth, as they point out with great clarity in today’s editorial:

Some of Mr. Trump’s other promises are even more vague. Mr. Trump was asked after a speech last week if he would act to make child care more affordable. He said he would, but in the following two minutes, he didn’t manage to say anything coherent about how.

In other areas Mr. Trump has been more specific, but his plans would be disastrous.

He has proposed a tariff, or tax, of up to 20 percent on imports from foreign countries, along with an even higher tariff on imports from China. That bill would be paid by American consumers, in the form of higher prices, no matter how many times or how loudly Mr. Trump says otherwise.

He has proposed rounding up and deporting millions of undocumented immigrants. Beyond the enormity of the impact on the lives of immigrants, their families and communities and the expense of the plan itself, mass deportations would blast a hole in the American economy, depriving employers of labor and retailers of consumers.

He has proposed extending tax cuts for the wealthy and for large corporations. Repeated experiments over the past half-century have made clear that the benefits of such tax cuts do not trickle down, do not generate economic growth and do not pay for themselves. They just make the rich richer.

I don’t have any insight into the Grey Lady’s reflex to reframe and normalize the Nazi point of view expressed by American fascists who are vying to take permanent control of the nation they claim is a smoking ruin of wokeness and colored criminals. Beyond that, all I can really say is fuck those putos.

Here’s Seth Meyers, making the same point, but with a great dollop of humor:

[1] The headline and article have been replaced at the top of the mobile app by this exercise in obfuscation and both-sides to every story syndrome, which buries the obvious fact, expressed plainly in today’s editorial, that tariffs are paid by the consumers of the nation that imposes them. Mexico didn’t, according to some experts, pay to build Trump’s fucking wall, Grey Lady:

For Trump, Tariffs Are the Solution to Almost Any Problem

The former president has proposed using tariffs to fund child care, boost manufacturing, quell immigration and encourage use of the dollar. Economists are skeptical.

So are high school graduates who paid attention in class…

Sly handmaiden of fascism

The Grey Lady, inscrutably, specializes in inventive headlines that frame issues to favor an increasingly deranged and desperate American Nazi’s candidacy. Look at the big challenge facing Kamala Harris at the upcoming debate with Donald, as framed by the NY Times. Oh, my!

As the Times idiotically frames it, Harris seemingly has to distance herself from the “unpopular” Biden while seeming to support the remarkable range of good policies she and the shockingly successful Joe Biden administration put into law during three short years.

You see, the headline suggests, if she criticizes the unpopular Biden — she takes a grave political risk. At the same time, if she supports him and their record of achievement 100% — apparently that’s an equally perilous position.

She’s on a greasy tightrope, suggests the NY Times, with a highly motivated Trump, jaws open, sharp teeth glistening, well-honed playbook in his back pocket, poised for a fatal pounce if she takes one misstep in this supremely delicate balancing act.

For a much smarter take on the upcoming “debate”, here’s my mother’s favorite, Frank Bruni. The sections below his fine opinion piece are like a cool drink on a hot day.

Rhetorical question: when did the NY Times become the fucking Völkischer Beobachter?