Trump is made of Teflon. Nothing sticks to him.

Maybe he is teflon coated but there are real transgressions that will get him undone. the speed of a scandal in the news cycle is much greater than the speed of a crime through the legal process.

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

I assume everyone is familiar with Chomsky's thesis on corporate shill candidates. Exec summary if not: Dems generally blue chip cos and NY liberal elites, rep oil and other older industries plus American aristocracy. Generally speaking holds up. Obama was Google and Goldman's darling. Harris clearly will have a base with the Frisco nerds. They'll throw tonnes of dollars her way.

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

acemuzzy wrote:

Kamala Harris send great during the Kavanagh stuff, so it's good seeing her in the mix for Prezzo. She'd get my vote I reckon. But no real idea how she's likely to fare in the primaries.

Eugh

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

In the meantime, Kamala Harris, someone no one heard of just two years ago, is being given a platform by all the major press. Look at her book. The title, the cover. It screams "female version of Obama just made for you consumer peons to endorse". Ridiculous. I predict get less than 10% in Iowa and not more than 16% in Pennsylvania

Did I write Penn, I meant New Hampshire.

Right on cue! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/22/facebook-new-emails-leaked-six4three-lawsuit-user-data

The memo also references a meeting between a Facebook staffer and the head of California’s eCrime unit to discuss then-California attorney general Kamala Harris’s office of privacy protection.

“The meeting went well and we were left with several useful assurances about the AG’s intentions – the most important being that they view Facebook as a good actor and they will keep communications with us open (we will not unknowingly be the subject of an investigation),” Levine wrote.

It is, of course, an ideology of the professional class, of sound-minded East Coast strivers, fresh out of Princeton or Harvard, eagerly quoting as “authorities” their peers in the other professions, whether economists at MIT or analysts at Credit Suisse or political scientists at Brookings. Above all, this is an insider’s ideology; a way of thinking that comes from a place of economic security and takes a view of the common people that is distinctly patrician.

Now, here’s the mystery. As a group, journalists aren’t economically secure. The boom years of journalistic professionalization are long over. Newspapers are museum pieces every bit as much as Bernie Sanders’s New Deal policies. The newsroom layoffs never end: in 2014 alone, 3,800 full-time editorial personnel got the axe, and the bloodletting continues, with Gannett announcing in September a plan to cut more than 200 staffers from its New Jersey papers. Book-review editors are so rare a specimen that they may disappear completely, unless somebody starts breeding them in captivity. The same thing goes for the journalists who once covered police departments and city government. At some papers, opinion columnists are expected to have day jobs elsewhere, and copy editors have largely gone the way of the great auk.

In other words, no group knows the story of the dying middle class more intimately than journalists. So why do the people at the very top of this profession identify themselves with the smug, the satisfied, the powerful? Why would a person working in a moribund industry compose a paean to the Wall Street bailouts? Why would someone like Post opinion writer Stephen Stromberg drop megatons of angry repudiation on a certain Vermont senator for his “outrageous negativity about the state of the country”? For the country’s journalists—Stromberg’s colleagues, technically speaking—that state is pretty goddamned negative.

Maybe it’s something about journalism itself. This is a field, after all, that has embraced the forces that are killing it to an almost pathological degree. No institution has a greater appetite for trendy internet thinkers than journalism schools. We are all desperately convincing ourselves that we need to become entrepreneurs, or to get ourselves attuned to the digital future—the future, that is, as it is described for us hardheaded journalists by a cast of transparent bullshit artists. When the TV comedian John Oliver recently did a riff on the tragic decline of newspaper journalism, just about the only group in America that didn’t like it was—that’s right, the Newspaper Association of America, which didn’t think we should be nostalgic about the days when its members were successful. Truly, we are like buffalo nuzzling the rifles of our hunters.

Or maybe the answer is that people at the top of the journalism hierarchy don’t really identify with their plummeting peers. Maybe the pundit corps thinks it will never suffer the same fate as, say, the Tampa Tribune. And maybe they’re right. As I wrote this story, I kept thinking back to Sound and Fury, a book that Eric Alterman published in 1992, when the power of pundits was something new and slightly alarming. Alterman suggested that the rise of the commentariat was dangerous, since it supplanted the judgment of millions with the clubby perspective of a handful of bogus experts. When he wrote that, of course, newspapers were doing great. Today they are dying, and as they gutter out, one might expect the power of this phony aristocracy to diminish as well. Instead, the opposite has happened: as serious journalism dies, Beltway punditry goes from strength to strength.

It was during that era, too, that the old-school Post columnist David Broder gave a speech deploring the rise of journalistic insiders, who were too chummy with the politicians they were supposed to be covering. This was, he suggested, not only professionally questionable. It also bespoke a fundamental misunderstanding of the journalist’s role as gadfly and societal superego:

I can’t for the life of me fathom why any journalists would want to become insiders, when it’s so damn much fun to be outsiders—irreverent, inquisitive, impudent, incorrigibly independent outsiders—thumbing our nose at authority and going our own way.

Yes, it’s fun to be an outsider, but it’s not particularly remunerative. As the rising waters inundate the Fourth Estate, it is increasingly obvious that becoming an insider is the only way to hoist yourself above the deluge. Maybe that is one reason why the Washington Post attracted the fancy of megabillionaire Jeff Bezos, and why the Post seems to be thriving, with a fancy new office building on K Street and a swelling cohort of young bloggers ravening to be the next George Will, the next Sid Blumenthal. It remains, however precariously, the cradle of the punditocracy.

Meanwhile, between journalism’s insiders and outsiders—between the ones who are rising and the ones who are sinking—there is no solidarity at all. Here in the capital city, every pundit and every would-be pundit identifies upward, always upward. We cling to our credentials and our professional-class fantasies, hobnobbing with senators and governors, trading witticisms with friendly Cabinet officials, helping ourselves to the champagne and lobster. Everyone wants to know our opinion, we like to believe, or to celebrate our birthday, or to find out where we went for cocktails after work last night.

Until the day, that is, when you wake up and learn that the tycoon behind your media concern has changed his mind and everyone is laid off and that it was never really about you in the first place. Gone, the private office or award-winning column or cable-news show. The checks start bouncing. The booker at MSNBC stops calling. And suddenly you find that you are a middle-aged maker of paragraphs—of useless things—dumped out into a billionaire’s world that has no need for you, and doesn’t really give a damn about your degree in comparative literature from Brown. You start to think a little differently about universal health care and tuition-free college and Wall Street bailouts. But of course it is too late now. Too late for all of us.

Not even just media magnates. Billionaires from any field like to have a crack at ownership of media outlets where they can control their coverage. Most such journalism becomes indistinct from marketing; and if it isn't flogging something then it is simply banal.

One thing that's always confused me about centrists is their insistence on compromise. But only compromise from the left to the right. Never the other way round.

Sometimes what you need is just governments that deal in pragmatic management and that’s what coalitions and blends of the middle do. There is a place for it. But we can see from the ruptures in democracies that some actual weird and non business as usual thought is required, we need that kind of thought that would create the NHS today - something that actively heals and puts everyone back on the same page.

In a similar way that uprisings are not the basis for good government good leadership needs to move in phases to suit the challenges. The best for new ideas and fight are not the same as those who hold the fort and keep things smooth. Those who keep things smooth are not the best at repairing things.

Armitage_Shankburn wrote:

prepare for disappointment

You know its coming

Prepare for disappointment

I’d like to see that, sure. I don’t have any expectation that this will do that, however.

It is bound to cause Trump more headaches by giving congressional committees more reasons to investigate him. And Trump is going to be raging across Twitter over the next couple of days which is always entertaining.

What struck me as I looked back and thought about that exchange between Don Jr. and his father was, first, that Mr. Trump had frequently told me and others that his son Don Jr. had the worst judgment of anyone in the world. And also, that Don Jr. would never set up any meeting of any significance alone – and certainly not without checking with his father.

ah, nevertheless...

Lol Cohen. Fucking hell we are at the point of what's it gonna take.

This hearing has been amazing bants if nothing else.