The LA Times won't be endorsing for president this year. Neither will the Washington Post. Bill Gates has "quietly" donated $50 million to Kamala Harris. Jamie Dimon "privately" supports Harris but won't say so publicly.
This is all because prominent billionaires are afraid of retribution from Donald Trump if he wins the election. Not social opprobrium or anything like that. Direct retribution from the president of the United States.
Think on that.
Well, if I donated that kind of money, I'd probably be quiet about it too. That's not the message of Harris ("the billionaire's president") or the kind of footprint I'd want leave. I'd be happy to endorse Harris, but not so thrilled to talk about the exact amount. That's just gonna distract people.
The newspaper non-endorsements, though. That's nuts.
"Nuts" is not what newspapers too timid to endorse is. What it is, is total and utter cowardice in the face of a bully they fear.
The LA Times and the Wash Post would not hesitate to issue warnings about an impending hurricane. No, they would see that as part of their duty to inform their readers about a major threat. But the threat of another Trump presidency? Nope, that's too risky to their bottom lines.
With the LAT it isn't fear. It is that the paper is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, and 2017 he interviewed for a job in the Trump Administration. He's a surgeon and inventor of medical devices, and he wanted a senior role in the health care side of things. Presumably he would still want such a job in the next Trump Administration.
So with the LAT it isn't fear, but rather sucking up.
No, I disagree. Sucking up is a way to get something you don't think you'd get solely by your attributes -- in other word, you suck up because you fear your quals aren't enough to get you they job you want.
Well, yah. When has Trump ever hired people based upon qualifications? There are exactly three ways to get a job offer from Trump:
1) Be related to him (like his kids);
2) Suck his d!ck (like Laura Loomer);
3) Suck up (like everybody else, including Soon-Shion).
2. suck his d/ck (Melania Trump). AKA the future third ex Mrs Trump.
You also have to look like you could play the part in a Hollywood movie. Women have to be good looking, men have to look the part. Mark Milley was hired over several other more senior generals because of his strong chin.
And WaPo's boss is Sir William Lewis KB, a Murdon minion who didn't fall very far from the tree.
It's never political with Murdoch, it's business.
who? the decision was made by one jeff bezos. maybe you've heard of amazon? maybe you remember amazon's cloud service business getting a billion dollar contract with the defense department and maybe you remember trump trying his gosh darnedest to revoke the contract. bezos wants to avoid a repeat.
if this was left to editorial board the endorsement would have gone to harris without question.
And this is why Citizen99 is right.
Freedom of the Press
RIP
True. Lewis is just the feed trough.
Bezos knows that if Harris wins, it will have no effect on his government contracts, endorsement or not.
But if Trump wins, and WaPo endorsed Harris, the vengeance would rain down on every aspect of his life and business.
I suppose you could call that a de facto endorsement of Harris.
Nice business you got there. Be ashamed if anything happened to it.
Typical mob threat.
Trump knows something we all hate to face: everyone prioritizes their self-interest above all else. That includes big media, even the mighty Washington Post. Yes, even Jeff Bezos fears the wrath of Azathoth.
The punditry is ablaze with warnings above how harmful a second Trump term would be with all the "guardrails" that supposedly constrained him the first time. Here's some breaking news: terrible damage was done in the first term, despite those "guardrails." What more evidence do we need than the very fact that, for the first time in our history, media companies are AFRAID to endorse their preferred candidate? A secondary question is which fear is the dominant one: fear of financial damage or fear of being imprisoned (if not killed).
People talk about how Trump would crush press freedom in a second term. News flash: he's already done it!
"Trump knows something we all hate to face: everyone prioritizes their self-interest above all else"
I don't think that's remotely true for many if not most people. People donate time and money to charities, risk harm to themselves to save others, etc. Hell, parents sacrifice enormously for children. None of that is strictly speaking in their own self-interest.
I guess if you start defining "self-interest" in expansive ways such that it swallows the premise, then, sure.
If you promote a culture in which everyone is a rat fighting for crumbs, people will act like rats fighting for crumbs and we have the last 100,000 years of human history continued.
If you promote a culture in which everyone supports one another, someday maybe you'll get that.
Billionaires have self interest in keeping America a free country, since a lot of their holdings are in either landed property (can’t be moved to another country) or in the stock market (can tank if it becomes too overt that America has become a kleptocracy). And of course, if America goes full fascist, they could find themselves pushed out a window (like billionaires occasionally are in Russia) or jailed (as billionaires occasionally are in China).
It’s that billionaires are too stupid to realize their self interest lies in a free America that’s the problem.
"It’s that billionaires are too stupid to realize.."
Or maybe they do realize, and their support of Trump is kind of "insurance", assuming Trump will not attack supporters, at least not enough to make them actually not rich.
"Billionaires have self interest in keeping America a free country"
Wrong. Many billionaires live in dictatorships and they do just fine there. Do the occasional favor for the guy on top and they even get tax breaks. Check out all those billionaires in Russia, China, and the Arab world. From a billionaire's perspective an autocracy may be *preferable* to a free country.
And that keeps me up at night.
Billionaires can move wherever they like.
Didn't the Arabs call donnie before they killed Khashoggi, presumably to ask if donnie was okay with it?
Trump is very much a "if you're not for me, you're against me" kind of guy. I don't expect he will see a non-endorsement as any less hostile than a Harris endorsement, and I expect the newspaper owners know that.
I believe that it's not fear of Trump so much as the owners' fear that if they force an endorsement of Trump, which is what they want, enough staff will quit that the papers won't be able to operate. Even forcing a non-endorsement is already costing them senior people; forcing a Trump endorsement would likely cost them large fractions of their work forces.
Yah. All I can say is pay attention, ppl. Things mean things. Trump has plainly got some targets in the crosshairs, and more in the wings. You see people and companies backing down from the fight, you're seeing fear of facism.
Germans at least had some excuse. We're just willingly going fascist to own the libs.
It could be fear, or it could be business. Both Republicans and Democrats use software and banking services: why anger 50% of your customers?
My point, in our hyper partisan political world, it becomes more difficult, remove Elon M from this statement, for some business leaders to take strong, public, political positions that are opposed by one party.
I disagree. There's no 50-50 fear of Harris somehow punishing them if they don't back her.
It's fear of Trump, personal fear and also fear of what he might do to their corporations and personal finances. And every damned one of them would laugh if you asked them whether they had any similar fears about a Harris presidency.
S1AMER - to clarify, I was not claiming equal fear. I said "why anger 50% of your customers?"
Rather, my point, about 50% of the banking customers (users of Microsoft products etc) in the US support Trump, and the other half support Harris.
"my point, about 50% of . . . users of Microsoft products etc[] in the US support Trump"
Fun fact: Bill Gates does not work at Microsoft.
True Gates does not work at Microsoft. However, he remains a significant, likely valued in the billions, holder of Microsoft stock.
Hard to claim Gates is disinterested in the performance of Microsoft.
He had about 1% of the ownership when he left, which yes, would represent about ten billion dollars.
so the Michael Jordan sneaker excuse?
of all the lame, useless reactionary centrist takes
sheesh
Your point is to ignore what's happening and claim something else is happening.
Bezos and others are directly afraid that a second-term President Trump will (regardless of legality) turn the power of the executive branch against them and their businesses.
That is not "angering 50% of your customers." That is angering one man willing to abuse his authority in pursuit of a revenge.
The numbers vary, but the last I saw suggests as many as 16% of Republicans don't support Trump's candidacy. You're really arguing they'll be pissed off if the Post endorses Harris, despite the Post having endorsed Democrats almost exclusively since Carter in 1976 without having "angered 50%" of their customers?
So even if your point weren't a deflection from the real issue--Trump's reckless abuse of authority, fear, and threats, including threatening his own VP and sending an armed mob to the Capitol chanting "Hang Mike Pence" in an attempt to compel Pence to interfere with election certification--it still wouldn't make any sense.
+1
Well said.
The US has more "guardrails" than pretty much any democracy on earth. Separation of powers, checks and balances. Impeachment. The 14th Amendment. An ostensibly free press. And finally the voters. One by one we've seen these fail. There have been so many "off ramps" offered, and everybody has not wanted to take responsibility, hoping the next one down the line would do the dirty work for them. (Although in some cases, like the Supreme Court, to quote Hamlet, they did make love to this appointment...)
We got one more off ramp coming up. Let's hope we finally take it without fear.
In Citizens United and Trump v. US, the Supreme Court has actively furthered the cause of oligarchy and authoritarianism.
Yeah, the pundits out there saying "well, we'll still have the rule of law" if Trump wins again have forgotten that one minor detail: the SCOTUS has pretty much said the president is above the law for almost anything he wants to do. What's to stop Trump from using the DOJ or FBI to shut down a newspaper that writes something he doesn't like? And with the Republican party in his iron grip, impeachment is off the table, too.
He'll be a straight-up dictator.
Actually, that is not what they said. They said he is immune in his role as president, executing the law. They just made it so ambiguous where the limits are, they get to decide, not the president or anybody else.
I’ve raised this question: Can a President sell pardons? The pardon power is granted to Presidents explicitly and exclusively by the Constitution. It couldn’t be more ‘core’, could it? The Court said that the exercise of core powers is absolutely immune from prosecution. Of course, for anyone else, demanding money to perform an official act is bribery, according to the Roberts Court. Bribery is explicitly named by the Constitution as a ‘high crime or misdemeanor’ for which a President or other official may be impeached. The Constitution also explicitly allows a President or other official to be prosecuted for the same act for which s/he was impeached and removed from office. How can the Court decisions be correct in light of the Constitution?
Short answer is, it can't be correct, and no amount of Roberts's befuddled whining can make it correct. That's what reduced Sotomayor to tears of sorrow and frustration in her chambers.
It's a completely, totally, and utterly lawless ruling that directly contravenes, where it doesn't ignore, every available shred of evidence from our founding period about the legal status of a president, and every settled understanding of that status from Washington's first taking of the oath in April of 1789 to the day this decision was announced.
Our normal vocabulary really doesn't have words for the way Roberts and his sidekicks have traduced our entire constitutional structure. The only fit analog I could point to would be what the Stuart monarchs tried to do in 17C Britain.
+1
SCOTUS's grant of criminal immunity did not confer impeachment immunity. Presumably, the court's view is that if a president does something bad, like taking a bribe, it's up to Congress to deal with it. Also presumably, impeachment strips away presidential immunity for the acts for which the president is impeached.
I agree on the impeachment part-- although honestly, I think the Roberts court would strain camels through needles' eyes without rest to find a way to invent immunity from impeachment for trump-- but I don't know of anything in their immunity ruling that would make a convicted ex-president liable for criminal prosecution after conviction. "Whoever" would still have been president when the acts were committed, and their invented immunity resides in the office rather than the person.
That's the biggest difference I can see between their invented immunity and the divine right of kings, and at least in one way it's actually better than divine right, because it would persist beyond the time in office.
The language of the impeachment sections quite specifically says that a person can be prosecuted for the same offence for which they are impeached. Indeed, one of Donnie's legal arguments was that he could only be prosecuted for acts committed while president if he was first impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate.
That's definitely what the language of those sections says, and that was definitely one of his lawyers' arguments, agreed. Unless I'm way off base, though, what the immunity ruling says is that as a matter of constitutional principle, no president may be prosecuted for any exercise of core powers and responsibilities of the office, no matter how illegal, and can only be prosecuted for other official acts if prosecutors can meet some vague standard about not harming presidential powers in ways that only the current court majority understands.
The key thing is that they've invoked constitutional principles here, it seems to me, and since they have, they've set up the framework for interpreting those impeachment clauses, including whether and how even impeached-and-convicted ex-presidents can be tried criminally for things they did while in office.
Another way to put that is that the immunity attaches to the office and applies in perpetuity to whoever's in it for the period of their lives when they're in it. Because they find this immunity in [supposedly] the constitution itself, the immunity that covers time in office doesn't get erased when they're not presidents any longer but stays with them for anything they've done in office. It doesn't matter whether a president is removed through impeachment or loses re-election or is term-limited out-- how they become ex-presidents isn't material; what matters is that whatever they do while in office is covered by that criminal immunity, both when in office and after they leave office. [This is one of the real obscenities of this decision, imo.]
IOW, being impeached and convicted isn't retroactive-- it won't make someone an un-president. And since they've said this is what the constitution says about people when they're presidents, that interpretation has to govern what happens to ex-presidents no matter how they reached that stage of life.
Let's try a hypothetical. Suppose we had trump on tape taking a billion-dollar bribe for appointing some particular person as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, even to the point that it met the court's own ridiculous standards of what official bribery is. Suppose further that he got impeached and convicted for it, and thrown out on his butt.
I think that because a) removal isn't retroactive, and b) he was president at the time of the crime, and c) he was exercising a core explicitly-delegated authority, that the court will say the immunity ruling forbids prosecuting him for that bribery.
It's true enough that there could not be a more clear contradiction of the "shall nevertheless be liable and subject to indictment," etc, clause on impeachment, as you point out. But I don't see how we can rely on the plain words of that clause.
That's because this blatant contradiction of plain words is actually only the gnat for this current majority. It already swallowed the camel when it invented a presidential immunity that completely contravenes both the letter of all contemporaneous evidence and the spirit that moves our system. It would have no trouble regurgitating an exception for a trump who was justifiably impeached and removed. They're already comfortable in the asterisk business.
Which is not to say that a different majority could, would, and probably should use these clauses to overrule and revoke the immunity decision if that chance ever came up.
Sure, but they eliminated any way to actually investigate the President, either, stymying the search orders issued even by Congress.
Tyranny of the minority is why it’s happening here. All other democratic peers would never allow something like a fifth of the country to control half its legislature or determine its executive.
It's fairly common in parliamentary democracies for a party to win a parliamentary majority and control of the government with much less than a majority of the popular vote.
That happens in Westminster systems with more than two parties, where constituencies can be won by plurality vote to form legislative majorities; GB and Canada are probably the leading recent examples (although the current Canadian government doesn't have a majority even in Parliament).
Other parliamentary systems, like Germany's, which are more strictly based on proportional vote share, make legislative-majority governments based in minority voting support much less likely. Coalition governments are more usual in these systems and normally involve some significant compromises among the coalition parties. In these countries the kind of caucus-enforced legislative minority rule that we've seen in GB and Canada is much less likely. But in GB and Canada they've tended until fairly recently to be more respectful of norms than we have, so there's that.
Even with only two parties, in a "first past the post" system a party that gets 51 percent of the vote in 51 percent of the seats can get a majority with barely more than a quarter of the popular vote. It never actually gets that extreme, but Canada has certainly seen quite a few elections where the party that got the most seats didn't get the most votes.
Yes, they fear retribution from Trump, so they're trying to curry favor now.
But, of course, none of them fears in the least that Harris if she wins would in any way punish them for helping Trump now. That's not how she is, and they know that.
and yet this alarms nobody in the press. If I was the Harris campaign I would put it on blast
If the Harris campaign put it on blast, I expect our national press would ignore it entirely, or run a short "Trump says otherwise" piece.
"But, of course, none of them fears in the least that Harris if she wins would in any way punish them for helping Trump now. That's not how she is, and they know that."
So Elon Musk has no reason at all to fear that liberals will react against him because of his support for Trump? This seems wrong, I have seen numerous comments by liberals advocating that Tesla be boycotted or SpaceX nationalized or whatever. .
Nice sleigh of hand to pretend both are equal. Please point to a single comment, policy, or reason HARRIS has given to suggest she might use the US government to retaliate against Trump supporters. Hell, Roberts already gave Democrats the power to have anyone they want sent to Guantanamo or killed. That was a literal argument used in front of the Supreme Court of a power the President would have under Roberts decision to grant immunity to the President for close to everything.
No one fears Harris would lift a single finger to punish anyone. The same is not true for Trump who campaigns almost exclusively on promising to punish his enemies and those of his supporters.
So GTFO with cheap false equivalencies.
"Nice sleigh of hand to pretend both are equal. Please point to a single comment, policy, or reason HARRIS has given to suggest she might use the US government to retaliate against Trump supporters. ..."
The sleight of hand is pretending it is just threats from the candidates themselves that need be considered when considering whether to endorse. Their supporters can also be a danger.
By your own words, they may be threatened with boycotts or "nationalization" by "the Left". And we know from recent history that "the Right" might use mob violence against them or shoot up their offices.
We know the potential for violence exists on both sides but we also know, because it has been studied and researched extensively, that the overwhelming majority of political violence is committed by those on the right. So, yeah, pretending the potential threat is equal from both sides is simply lying.
Boycotts are a customer right. No company is entitled to people buying their stuff.
As for nationalization, that would require the President pushing for it and we've already established that unlike Trump, Harris will not use the government as her personal baseball bat to punish people that disagree with her.
Troll better.
Disgusting…
23 Nobel Prize-winning economists call Harris’ economic plan ‘vastly superior’ to Trump’s.
Guess who is not on the list, cough, Krugman.
Cowards or fellow travelers?
Are you suggesting the Krugman is somehow not supportive of Harris, or is supporting Trump? The dude writes two columns a week talking about how Trump is an idiot and his economic policies are bonkers.
+1
Krugman calls out Trump's economics on almost a daily basis in his columns. If any economist or columnist is on Trump's enemies list it is Krugman.
But Trump seems not to target individual economists or opinion writers in the MSM, he just keeps saying the MSM overall are "fake news", while in their headlines his economic proposals are often treated as worthy of equal consideration with real economics.
NY Times policy:
Does this include sugar coating or diminishing the worst qualities and actions of any candidate? To honestly report the facts, warts and all, should be the goal of any news agency. Taking any politicians word at face value is irresponsible in the age of Trump.
Obviously this particular policy does not apply to the op-Ed and editorial pages, as the NYT is one major newspaper that has actually endorsed a Presidential candidate (Harris).
The NYT policy applies to "journalists" and "staff members" of the News and Opinion departments, not the editorial board itself, which speaks for the paper. The paper's endorsement of Harris included a blistering critique of Trump and that was great to see.
This week there were two open letters on the election. One was signed by 23 Nobel economists. The other, by 82 Nobel laureates from various fields. Each included language supporting Harris's candidacy; i.e., an endorsement. Krugman signed neither letter, and if he had it would likely have been a clear violation of Times policy.
Thanks for the clarification. I didn’t know if Krugman was classified as a ‘staff member’ or something else equivalent to an independent contractor/contributor.
I would think Krugman is a "staff member." His employer is the Times, and he's guided by whatever policies apply for employees (in particular, for the Opinion dept.).
I happen to be "contributor." Or was in years past. (I have 30+ bylines, but nothing to do with politics or opinion.) The legal restrictions for independent contributors mostly relate to copyright and that sort of thing. I'm free to put up yard signs and make endorsements (not that anyone would care).
Well, Wikipedia says his day job is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate Center at CUNY, though I guess that wouldn’t preclude being on the NYT payroll as well. Congrats on being a Contributor, must be a nice gig.
The billionaires who wanted anti-genocide protesters arrested, beaten, ostracized from the work place know how the system they oversee works.
"Don't believe anything they say and I'll tell you how awful everything is, who to blame and that I’ll make everything wonderful again.”
And after 8 years, 48+% buy into that, mostly because the lies feel soooo good.
“Reich” comes to my mind. ymmv
Gives a whole new meaning to the term “Yellow Press”.
+1!
Well, no matter how ruthless Trump may turn out to be, we can still celebrate Joe Biden for his decision to selflessly run for re-election. He could have stopped at one term so there could be a healthy primary contest to establish winning policies and a battle-tested candidate best able to defeat Trump. But who cares about that?
I'm sure that after November 5, Biden (along with Merrick "I'll get the job done" Garland) will be viewed favorably by Democrats - both the general public and politicians.
Re Garland: His delayed strategy of "starting from the bottom and move up" was a sure fire winner. Start with scruffy Proud Boys and it's easy to get the goods on Kenneth Chesebro
In last week's podcast. Josh Marshall had a few words for people who are nay-saying now, even before the votes are cast, much less counted,so as to set themselves up as brilliant prophets and to fix the "blame" before we know whether any blame is justified.
Should Harris lose to Trump in 2024, none of the electoral pundits will point to her campaigning with a Republican militant and austerity proponent as a significant reason why.
Oh, I doubt if that will lose her any votes that she hadn’t already lost by failing to promise to cut off all military aid to Israel.
TIL that the Democratic Socialists wanted the administration to cut off shipments of Iron Dome components to Israel — a system which protects cities full of noncombatants*. To think I once considered joining that group.
*Certainly some parts of the system also protect military sites, but in an account of the Iranian missile attack on Israeli military sites, it was noted that some sites were left unprotected in favor of defending cities.
Harris has run a great campaign, raised astronomical amounts of money, and secured endorsements any presidential candidate dreams of.
If Harris loses, it's not because of "untested" ideas or poor campaign skills. It will be because a sizable chunk of Americans prefer fascism and another chunk are too stupid/lazy to figure out what fascism actually means.
The American voters have to take responsibility for their choices at some point. Trump has shouted his plans over and over, and the media has slavishly covered it all. If the voters go for Trump now, there really isnt anything any Democrat could do that would ensure victory.
Trump is haunted by the ghosts of Fred Trump, Roy Cohn and Adolf Hitler. Thanks to the MAGA, he could very well unload his ghosts on all of us.
Pretty much. +1
+1
Excellent assessment, far from so many tiresome ones, especially those "informing" us that Harris's speech problems are worse than those of trump.
Absolutely agree with this.
No sitting or former Vice President who actually ran for their party's nomination has been defeated in more than 70 years. It's overwhelmingly likely that, had Joe Biden announced early on he'd be a one-termer, his Vice President would have been able to secure the nomination.
If she ends up losing to Trump, in light of the above it's hard to see why Biden's delay in announcing he wouldn't seek a second term will have hurt her. If anything, the quick process means she's been able to avoid making the kinds of promises and pledges to sundry Democratic constituencies that could be used against her in the general election.
The blame for Trumps win can be solely placed on the idiots who vote for him. People who can't see past the tip of their own nose. People who enjoy hating "the other" more than they care about their own well being. People who like to scapegoat. Biden and Harris share little to no blame for a Trump win. Our fellow citizens are to blame.
Fuck off troll.
Everyone is subject to reasonable criticism here, including Biden. I will say that all the dementia cases I'm aware of involved not just an increasing decline, but a decline that was hard to see at the time: when you spend time with someone every day it is easier to overlook deterioration, for example, and I'm talking within in family, not in the Oval Office. Expecting Biden or his campaign to make decisions going into the primary with knowledge of a decline that appears to have rapidly hastened after the primary ended isn't fair.
As for me, I'm inclined to level the blame on the man who actively wants to be elected so that he can be a fascist dictator, the people supporting him politically, the millions who will vote for him, and the Republicans in the Senate after Jan 6 who voted to acquit.
The Nazis are much more responsible for the atrocities committed by the Nazis than the many people who could have or should have stopped them sooner.
Biden had a bad debate. I haven't seen any other signs of significant decline in his mental capacity.
Detroit News: no endorsement. Kamala Harris too "far left." WTF?
I've been a critic of journalism during the threat of Trump but I never knew they were actually this spineless. F'ing poltroons.
The Detroit News has always been right Republican. I doubt there's anyone left on their staff who could write a Harris endorcement without swallowing their tongue.
Well, they're not the Detroit Free Press, you know.
I can't believe the number of folk terrified of a fat ugly liar. What a bunch of weak spined fools. I am shocked that they are such wusses.
If you are not afraid of his brownshirts, it’s because you are one.
👍👍👍👍👍
He isn't the issue. The people who he surrounds himself, his enablers in government and the people who support him are. January 6th happened because of his supporters. Our fellow Americans would prefer a trust fund con man to be president rather than a woman and former prosecutor.
January 6 didn’t just happen, TFG lit the match. Like any successful crime boss, he knows how to get his underlings to do the dirty work while ducking responsibility.
With LA Times and WaPo it is right-wing ideology at the top doing its insidious work. They will soon be joining the WSJ.
I don’t think an endorsement from a newspaper matters much and if the WP wants to change their policy I gather it is their prerogative. Whether it indicates how the newspaper cover the news it something the future will tell. However, what’s gives cause for distraught is that they chose this particular election to announce their new policy. They would have been better served to announce their position one year ahead of time to preclude negative inferences.
I wonder what the odds are of them changing this policy again in 2028? I'd guess pretty high. This is a change of convenience not of any ethical or moral considerations.
‘Convenience’ in this case meaning ‘naked self-interest’.
The editorial board was working on their endorsement for Harris. They leaked that almost immediately. This was a Bezos decision. If you think Bezos opted to "change Post newspaper policy" for any reason that has anything to do with anything beyond fear of retribution, I don't know what to tell you.
The spin that it's a return to the Post's regular procedures, as if 1976 to present (a total of 50 years) didn't represent a new procedure, just exposes how empty the "policy change" claim truly is.
democracy dies in darkness, eh?
Well portrayed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/25/ann-telnaes-cartoon-donald-trump-kamala-harris-washington-post/
I think that, if trump wins, it's going to be hilarious to see all these folks suck up to him. Pathetic too, but mostly hilarious.
At some point, it's all hilarious. NY Post endorsement of Trump
https://nypost.com/2024/10/25/opinion/the-post-endorses-donald-trump-for-president-the-clear-choice-for-a-better-future/
The Chinese, Russians, Saudis… they all arrest the billionaires and oligarchs who step out of line.
The NY post isn't even worthy of lining a bird cage with. Sensationalist rag akin to the National Enquirer. Pure garbage.
It’s the enemy propaganda outlet with some modest entertainment value.
Modest is an exageration if you ask me.
It's not just Trump, it's the billionaires who support him.
This is why it should be illegal to have that much wealth.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” Not coming out strongly for Harris is akin to doing nothing. It's either cowardice or self interest. It's certainly not the actions of good people.
I don't think the fear is limited to retribution by Trump; I think it includes fear of terrorism by Trump fanatics.
Yup!
He uses his fanatics as a club so in the end it’s the same thing.
I don't know. The super wealthy don't live in our world. They buy all the special treatment and privacy they can. Do you ever see them in an airport, the grocery store, the gas station? Any place the rest of us congregate? I don't see them worried about Trump fanatics. They will never get close to them.
I've been wondering why we don't prosecute such inciters such as trump for stochastic terrorism.
Some have tracked trump's multitudinous lies, but I doubt that the murders of people thought to be Muslims, Mexicans, or Americans of Chinese heritage (i recall that some Hindus were murdered, mistaking Muslims) have been fully compiled.
A possible silver-lining is that, of the people that haven't yet decided how to vote, more are likely to hear about "billionaires shutting up journalists" (and maybe realize the danger) than to read the endorsement.
Are you ready?
https://youtu.be/JP2aufZQqCw?si=9V1sAZSJRxfupmFY
No, of course you aren’t.
https://helpcenter.washingtonpost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360002940991-Leadership-of-The-Washington-Post-newsroom
https://helpcenter.washingtonpost.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004745292-Leadership-of-The-Washington-Post-Opinions-section
Ha. It turns out, no amount of money can buy a fully functional backbone or a working conscience.
Lesson One in Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny is “Do not obey in advance.”
He writes:
Most of the power in authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
Jeff Bezos has succumbed to the kind of anticipatory obedience Snyder was describing. about in order, it would seem, to protect his Amazon fortune from a Trump administration that will be steeped in vengeance against Donald’s enemies, real and perceived. Because, although, according to The Columbia Journalism Review, an endorsement of Kamala Harris had already been prepared and was ready for publication, Bezos made the decision to pull the paper’s endorsement and instructed William Lewis, the publisher and CEO of the paper, to write a transparently awful justification of it.
Credit goes to Dr. Mary Trump for putting this out there.
How are we to trust anything in the Washington Post? In particular anything related to Trump? Perhaps a more positive spin on Trump weirdness? Perhaps more Trumpian commentators? Perhaps a right wing spin on President Trump putting down protests using the military? Articles lauding the success of his border policies but avoiding mention of concentration camps? I suspect that in time we will not see much difference between the Washington Post and Fox News.
This seems like a good time to cancel my subscription to WAPO, so I have done so.