monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Quote:

Such a dick this guy.

blatham calls Trump a dick. Nothing happens.

I call Hillary a ****. I get banned for two weeks for the reason of "Inappropriate."

How much more blatant can the hypocrisy and bias be here on a2k?

Not just the anti-conservative bias, but also the overt anti-male bias and gynocentrism.

So it's perfectly OK to call a man a dick, but unacceptable to call a woman a ****?

I want that annotated for the record here, that that's how the a2k rules work.

Let’s get one thing straight: I am not a fan of Facebook. I’m confident that social media is a cancer on our private lives and a source of derangement in our politics. I take it for granted that the tech barons are acquiring the power to tilt elections, and that they’ll be happy to play handmaidens to tyrants soft and hard so long as they can monetize our data. I take a certain mordant pleasure in watching Mark Zuckerberg and his minions scapegoated for the political failures of late-Obama-era liberalism.

But the liberal establishment’s fixation on Facebook’s 2016 sins — first the transmission of fake news and now the exploitation of its data by the Trump campaign or its appendages — still feels like a classic example of blaming something new because it’s new when it’s the old thing that mattered more. Or of blaming something new because you thought that “new” meant “good,” that the use of social-media data by campaigns would always help tech-savvy liberals and not their troglodytic rivals — and the shock of discovering otherwise obscures the more important role that older forms of media played in making the Trump era a reality.

No doubt all the activity on Facebook and the apparent use of Facebook’s data had some impact, somewhere, on Trump’s surprise victory. But the media format that really made him president, the one whose weaknesses and perversities and polarizing tendencies he brilliantly exploited, wasn’t Zuckerberg’s unreal kingdom; it wasn’t even the Twitter platform where Trump struts and frets and rages daily. It was that old pre-internet standby, broadcast and cable television, and especially TV news.

Start with the fake news that laid the foundation for Trump’s presidential campaign — not the sort that circulates under clickbait headlines in your Facebook feed, but the sort broadcast in prime time by NBC, under the label of reality TV. Yes, as media sophisticates we’re all supposed to know that “reality” means “fake,” but in the beginning nobody marketed “The Apprentice” that way; across most of its run you saw a much-bankrupted real estate tycoon portrayed, week after week and season after season, as a titan of industry, the for-serious greatest businessman in the world.

Where did so many people originally get the idea that Trump was the right guy to fix our manifestly broken government? Not from Russian bots or targeted social media ad buys, but from a prime-time show that sold itself as real, and sold him as a business genius. Forget unhappy blue collar heartlanders; forget white nationalists and birthers: The core Trump demographic might just have been Republicans who watched “The Apprentice,” who bought the fake news that his television program and its network sponsors gladly sold them.

That was step one in the Trump hack of television media. Step two was the use of his celebrity to turn news channels into infomercials for his campaign. Yes, his fame also boosted him on social media, but there you can partially blame algorithms and the unwisdom of crowds; with television news there were actual human beings, charged with exercising news judgment and inclined to posture as civic-minded actors when it suits them, making the decision to hand day after day of free coverage to Donald Trump’s rallies, outrages, feuds and personal attacks.

Nothing that Cambridge Analytica did to help the Trump campaign target swing voters (and there’s reason to think it didn’t do as much as it claimed) had anything remotely like the impact of this #alwaysTrump tsunami, which probably added up to more than $2 billion in effective advertising for his campaign during the primary season, a flood that drowned all of his rivals’ pathetic tens of millions. And as cynical as I believe the lords of Silicon Valley to be, the more important cynicism in 2016 belonged to those television execs who were fine with enabling the wild Trumpian takeover of the G.O.P., because after all Republicans deserved it and Hillary was sure to beat him in the end.

Except that she didn’t beat him, in part because he also exploited the polarization that cable news, in particular, is designed to feed. In 2016 this polarization didn’t just mean that Fox became steadily more pro-Trump as he dispatched his G.O.P. rivals; it also meant that a network like CNN, which thrives on Team Red vs. Team Blue conflict, felt compelled to turn airtime over to Trump surrogates like Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski and Kayleigh McEnany because their regular stable of conservative commentators (I was one of them) simply wasn’t pro-Trump enough.

The depth and breadth of Trump skepticism among right-wing pundits was a pretty solid indicator of his unfitness for high office. But especially once he won the nomination this skepticism was often filtered out of cable coverage, because the important thing was to maintain the partisan shouting-match model. This in turn encouraged a sense that this was just a typical right-versus-left election, in which you should vote for Trump if you usually voted for Republicans … and in the end that’s what most G.O.P. voters did.

My own CNN experiences were positive; I admire the many fine journalists who work in television news. But it was clear enough being in that orbit in 2016, as it should be clear to anyone who watched Trump’s larger relationship to his television coverage, that the business model of our news channels both assumes and heightens polarization, and that it was ripe for exploitation by a demagogue who was also a celebrity.

It’s also clear — as the economists Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro wrote in these pages late last year — that among older white Americans, the core demographic where first the primaries and then the general election were decided, television still far outstrips the internet as the most important source of news. And indeed, the three economists noted, for all the talk about Breitbart’s influence and Russian meddling and dark web advertising, Trump only improved on Mitt Romney’s showing among Americans who don’t use the internet, and he “actually lost support among internet-using voters.” In a sense, you could argue, all those tweets mattered mainly because they kept being quoted on TV.

Which is not to say that the current freakout over Facebook doesn’t make a certain kind of sense. Beyond the psychological satisfaction of weaving the often-genuinely-sinister side of Silicon Valley into stolen-election theories, there’s a strategic wisdom to the center-left establishment’s focus on the internet.

What Trump did will be hard for a future demagogue to imitate: The generations who get their information from newscasts are dying out, the web is taking over at an accelerating pace and in the long run there is more to be gained in going after Mark Zuckerberg than in pillorying Jeff Zucker. And pillorying Fox’s hosts only helps their brand: the big tech companies regard themselves as part of the liberal cultural complex, so they’re vulnerable to progressive bullying and shaming; not so Sean Hannity, whose stalwart support for Trump was and remains vastly more important than any online stratagem.

In the end, as Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote recently for National Review, one implicit goal of the Facebook freakout is to ensure that “conservatives and populists will not be allowed to use the same tools as Democrats and liberals again, or at least not use them effectively.” If the trauma of Trump’s victory turns social-media gatekeepers into more aggressive and self-conscious stewards of the liberal consensus, the current freakout will have more than served its political purpose.

But like the television channels whose programming choices did far more than Facebook to make Donald Trump president, it won’t have served the truth.

Think this over.

Obama Forced FBI to Delete 500,000 Fugitives from Background Check System for Gun Purchases!

For more than 15 years, the FBI and ATF disagreed about who exactly was a fugitive from justice.

The FBI, which runs the criminal background check database, had a broad definition and said that anyone with an outstanding arrest warrant was prohibited from buying a gun. But ATF argued that, under the law, a person is considered a fugitive from justice only if they have an outstanding warrant and have also traveled to another state.

In a 2016 report, Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz urged the Justice Department to address the disagreement “as soon as possible.” Late last year, before President Trump took office, the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel sided with ATF and narrowed the definition of fugitives, according to law enforcement officials. The office said that gun purchases could be denied only to fugitives who cross state lines.

After Trump was inaugurated, the Justice Department further narrowed the definition to those who have fled across state lines to avoid prosecution for a crime or to avoid giving testimony in a criminal proceeding.

For 15 years, the FBI and the ATF have had a longstanding disagreement regarding the definition of “Fugitive from Justice,” a category that disqualifies prospective gun purchasers. According to ATF records, there were 49,448 transactions in this category between November 1999 and May 2015 that the FBI denied under its interpretation of the law, but that the ATF did not consider appropriate denials. 2,183 of these transactions resulted in firearms transfers that the FBI believed should have been denied, but the ATF did not agree and did not attempt to recover the firearms. This disagreement was referred to the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2008, and OLC provided informal advice in July 2008. In August 2010, the FBI requested formal reconsideration of that advice, but 6 years later OLC still has not rendered a decision. We believe this issue should be addressed as soon as possible.

The Department of Justice recently reviewed the “fugitive from justice” prohibitor and the application of the prohibitor in NICS background checks. The Department determined that the Brady Act does not authorize the denial of firearm transfers under the “fugitive from justice” prohibition based on the mere existence of an outstanding arrest warrant. To comply with the Department’s determination, the FBI will implement a new policy for applying the “fugitive from justice” prohibitor. This policy will require NICS to establish that the prospective purchaser: 1) has fled the state; 2) has done so to avoid prosecution for a crime or to avoid giving testimony in a criminal proceeding; and 3) is subject to a current or imminent criminal prosecution or testimonial obligation.

Federal law enforcement officials say that about 430,000 names of wanted people removed from the database were from Massachusetts.

Commissioner James Slater of the Massachusetts Department of Criminal Justice Information Services said that the reason that his state had so many fugitives in the FBI database is that state policy required sending the bureau the names of all people with an outstanding warrant, whether it was for misdemeanors or felonies.

Because Massachusetts state law prevents fugitives from buying guns, those individuals have now been added back to the federal database under the “state prohibitor” category and will be prevented from purchasing a firearm, he said.

I don't agree with everything he says here but I think he calls it right in a number of places

Conservative strategist Stephen K. Bannon oversaw Cambridge Analytica’s early efforts to collect troves of Facebook data as part of an ambitious program to build detailed profiles of millions of American voters, a former employee of the data-science firm said Tuesday.

The 2014 effort was part of a high-tech form of voter persuasion touted by the company, which under Bannon identified and tested the power of anti-establishment messages that later would emerge as central themes in President Trump’s campaign speeches, according to Chris Wylie, who left the company at the end of that year.

Among the messages tested were “drain the swamp” and “deep state,” he said.

But Trump never should have even made it out of the republican primary and he definitely shouldn't have come close enough to made a difference in swing states to be able win on the electoral college vote.

Breitbart, the alt-right news site whose executive chairman Steve Bannon was pushed out in January after feuding with President Donald Trump, has lost about half its readership according to comScore, raising questions about its future.

The site dropped from 15 million unique visitors in October, per comScore, to 13.7 million in November, 9.9 million in December, 8.5 million in January and 7.8 million in February.

Donald Trump's very public embarrassment of H.R. McMaster (CNN)

If we were to find through rigorous study and some resulting undeniable conclusions about how a consumer society with a pervasive, wealthy and influential media component (ie, TV) actually decreased watchers'/citizens' thoughtfulness, intelligence, empathy and sense of civic community to the point where democracy itself was at risk, what might we do about that problem?

Didn’t all previous presidents congratulate Putin?

Would You Believe That This Is All Obama’s Fault?
Many pointed out that Barack Obama congratulated Putin on his 2012 election victory, accusing those upset by Trump’s friendly call of hypocrisy. Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow at the time, said there was much internal debate about how to handle the situation, and Obama eventually went with a carefully worded statement that did commend Russians, but not Putin. Per the Times:

After that election, the State Department issued a statement in which it said, “The United States congratulates the Russian people on the completion of the presidential elections, and looks forward to working with the president-elect after the results are certified and he is sworn in.”

CBS's Mark Knoller reports:

Pres. Obama phoning congratulations from AF-1 to Pres-elect Vladimir Putin of Russia.

As the New York Times reported earlier in the week, there are serious charges that Putin rigged the election: "A day after claiming an overwhelming victory in Russia’s presidential election, Vladimir V. Putin on Monday faced a range of challenges to his legitimacy, including charges of fraud from international observers and a defiant opposition that vowed to keep him from serving his full six-year term."

Even the State Department called for an investigation into the election earlier in the week.

Yet with President Obama reportedly calling to congratulate Putin, apparently the White House isn't too concerned with the fraudulent election--or even its worrisome outcome.