monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Tucker Carlson was a big name at CNN, PBS, and msnbc for years, hosting his own show on each network, eh?

How quickly the cheese-eaters forget.

Jon was even more handsome a decade before that. Hollywood dreamboat looks. Re your computer... I'd recommend you check out Chromebooks. Smallish laptops for people who use their computers mainly for web browsing. Not a lot of storage but you can store on the cloud these days anyway. The screens are good and they are cheap as hell.

Thank you. It's been so long since I read it I don't even recall the names of the two fellas.

Carlson won't last long. It will soon be remembered that he's a serial abuser of women, eh?



Allegations of sexual abuse seem to emerge, somehow, against everyone who ever worked at Fox. That's all it takes, of course.

Cheese-eater: "As a child, I was sexually abused by my grandfather, my father, my older brothers, five of my uncles, 23 of my cousins, and that't just the men. My mother and the rest weren't any better. That's how I know O'Reilly is guilty."

Of course, they did some good things for me, too. They taught me to always vote democratic, for example.

But...but...but... That's unpossible!
Benen
That's the sort of thing that happens when you put a wrestling promoter into the White House.

It is what is going to continue happening.

Response moderated: Personal attack. See more info.

That is the key lesson here.

But there's another important lesson as well:

Rupert Murdoch's media operation in both England and in the US have demonstrated an inability to, and a disinterest in, maintaining basic ethical and legal standards.

WSJ
Well, thank god there's no current investigation of ties between this administration and Russia. And double thank god there's no connection between this administration and Exxon and Russia.

Thanks for the tip. I'm skeered of not having a mac, despite years of non support on this one from apple, so I'm also pissed at apple, who cut off support fairly fast, in my opinion. I know there are free security programs (or whatever you call them) for regular pc's. Never worried about all that with the mac.

I'll check it out, it may be time. Of course I'd have a learning curve, but I think I still can learn. Meantime I'm saving for house insurance, so that gives me time to consider. I also need to consider a not too old used mac as a possibility, it being twelve years since I used a regular PC. Think of my possibly complete confusion. Alternately, a used but relatively recent mac could possibly confound me a bit too.

It's weird, as I'm way behind on computer changes, but I've also kept this baby going for a long long time, which has taken some finesse.

Politics for today - now there seem to be two racists replacing one. Not that I know fer sure, since I've not watched, if the three of them are.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/19/fox-news-fires-racist-bill-o-reilly-promotes-racists-eric-bolling-and-jesse-watters.html

Yup. Both those guys are ugly.

What browser do you use?

Reuters

That is for sure, but when you are losing on so many fronts (like the MSM and the Dems have) it's important for the troops' morale to build up anything that even appears to be a victory regardless of whether or not it's inevitable that it will soon be followed by defeat.

This one election and the coverage it has received by the MSM is indicative of not how powerful they are but of how willing they are to abuse what power they have.

Despite an enormous and unusual amount of outside money flowing in, their guy didn't win and receiving more votes than the foremost GOP candidate is not a victory when you realize that there were something like 9 GOP candidates in the race, and in this situation, getting more votes than anyone else was only a ticket to the run-off in which the Dem is very unlikely to get more votes and the Repub absolutely will, and almost assuredly enough to take the race.

Never-the-less there was a ton of straight news coverage and countless OpEd pieces before and after the results and just about all spoke of the fear that is or at least should be coursing through Republican veins. The MSM has been bound and determined to make these Special Elections a sign that the GOP and, of course, Trump are in a lot of trouble less than 100 days into his presidency. If they couldn't wish it into actually materializing they were going to report on it in a way that would make you swear the Dems had won.

For instance the recent previous election where the Republican candidate won with a margin of 8 percentage points. Throughout the land, pundits touted that the GOP (and of course Trump) suffered a stunning blow because he only won by 8 percentage points. I don't know what the final split was but it might as well have been 50% vs 42%. I would call that a comfortable margin of victory and so would a lot of political writers at a different time and setting. Hell, I've seen people like EJ Dionne write that a split like that was " crushing" victory if the winner was a Democrat.

In a column published in the Washington Post either yesterday or the day before, Dana Milbank wrote an open letter to Kim Jong Un warning him that Trump is crazier than even him. In it Milbank makes a point that Americans were more concerned about the GA special election and the lawsuit involving an extremist who essentially contends Trump made him do it (Not sure what that story is all about because it is as obscure as the story of GA special election, at least as obscure as they would be if the MSM didn't have a political agenda to drive.) than what is happening in the waters around the Korean Peninsula.

Now Milbank clearly set out to write biting satire that threw a barb or two at Kim in the form of a couple of cheap and predictable jokes, but the target of the piece was, of course, Trump and the bit about the focus of the American people wasn't part of any absurdist joke. Milbank's theme was that all the saber rattling by Trump is to distract the MSM, the world, and the American people from the ruins of his presidency. He advised Kim not to fall for it because a) Trump is crazy enough to take it a step past phallus oscillation and b) Trump's dog wagging isn't working anyway, the American people care more about this important election and the utterly damning lawsuit.

Now I don't know about you, but, outside of this forum and a circle of friends who are friends because of a shared enjoyment of politics, I don't know a lot of people who had a clue about the special election or the lawsuit, and if they were told about the election and how it was never seriously going to do anything more than decide what two candidates were in yet another election, and they had remained awake during the explanation, they would have grimaced and said "Who the hell cares? Tell me about it after someone actually wins!"

The danger in this situation with the MSM is not that they are able to somehow force people to be interested in something that lacks interest for 95% of the public, or that they have been successful in convincing the majority of Americans that Ossoff actually won something, it is how hard they are trying to exert the influence of their power to reach into people's lives through television and print journalism, in order to help support the narrative they have created that Trump's presidency is in ruins.

This isn't about reporting the facts and the news. The only "news" here is how invested the MSM is in these obscure stories. You certainly can expect the Dems to get behind them and exaggerate the hell out of them, but you should neither expect nor accept the MSM doing so.

When Obama was president they buried or ignored stories that might hurt him and they would be doing it again if Clinton was president. You can bet the ranch they're not going to do it for Trump...just the opposite.

Of course they didn't bury or ignore every negative about Obama. Such a thing would be impossible to do unless they a) Controlled every news outlet including those on the internet b) Every story published was reviewed ahead of time to determine if it had an possibility to blow up. We're nowhere near such a situation and I'm not claiming we are, but when you see time after time some University publish a study on the negative/positive mention mix for Republicans and Democrats in the news and you see that invariably the Republican negative mention far outstrips that of the Democrat you are led to believe one of two things:

1) The world is really like a child's fairy tale and there are ogres, trolls and warlocks out there - they are called Republicans or 2) The MSM is biased towards Democrats.

The news media's roll in our democracy is at it's purest to provide us with the information we need to make important decisions as citizens; and especially the sort of information we as individual citizens would never have the skills and resources to obtain on our own. Despite how they feel about themselves the members of the media are in fact only human and they are going to carry biases into their workplace, but if they truly are the bastions of democracy they believe themselves to be than their responsibility to keep their workplaces free of bias is that much greater than for the average human.

Do you think the current crop is up to that challenge? I sure don't and the evidence I see is that they have come to a place where they are ignoring their ethics and rationalizing why they should attempt to influence the news and I despise and to some extent fear that arrogance

Just for the record, I pointed to one of those months ago. Apple is not worth the money by any means.

Firefox

I remember you did, I saved that post from you, and I meant to look it up and add that to this post, which I caused to be off topic, bad woman.
Anyway, I'll cogitate and eventually set up another thread instead. Thank you both.

Meantime, lots of foo going on about various Patriots, including Brady, including about Trump, re the Patriots visiting the White House as Super Bowl winners.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2017/02/01/why-some-fans-say-they-feel-conflicted-about-patriots/L02sxQMvGkdvCtpBV2nCON/story.html

Sort of a respite from conversation about nukes.

Brady is OK, but he'll never be a Steve Grogan.

I enjoy trading barbs with you blatham. You're one of the best and sometimes it's difficult to come up with something that doesn't come across as "Your mother wears combat boots" let alone something I feel might equal or top yours.

This one however, was your "Your mother wears combat boots"

I know you'll do better next time, and quite possibly in your response to this.