You’re likely to notice some missing names from this week’s Sunday APR. While junior high scold Maureen Dowd, climate change denier Bret Stephens, and pope-lecturer Ross Douthat have long been on the Not Appearing In This Picture list, they are joined this week by … everyone. At least, everyone who writes for the New York Times.
The reason to drop the Times editorial page comes partly from the attitude that the publication has displayed in articles and interviews going back well before the election. It’s the way they devoted the entire front page to the vital subject of Hillary Clinton’s email a week before the election. It’s the way they twice wrote major articles in that final week dismissing the important of the Trump–Russia connection, refuting evidence appearing in other publications, and giving a categorical denial that the FBI was conducting an investigation.
Another part is in the unfathomable failure to address those stories and provide a correction — either the New York Times was taken in by sources that painted it a completely inaccurate picture of the state of both the investigation into Clinton’s emails and the FBI’s evidence against Trump, or the New York Times deliberately distorted the available information, using its resources and position within the media to sell the nation on a lie and suppress developing news. The maddening thing is that, a year and a half later, we still don’t know the answer.
But the final reason for not including the New York Times in the APR is the largest — the New York Times just showed us that they consider their editorial page disposable. This part week, they not only suspended publication of their normal articles and editorials, and turned the page over to letters, they placed a deliberate filter on those letters, allowing only those that supported Donald Trump.
You don’t have to wonder why they did it. The Times editorial board provided the explanation.
The Times editorial board has been sharply critical of the Trump presidency, on grounds of policy and personal conduct. Not all readers have been persuaded. In the spirit of open debate, and in hopes of helping readers who agree with us better understand the views of those who don’t, we wanted to let Mr. Trump’s supporters make their best case for him as the first year of his presidency approaches its close.
That’s a staggering statement. It’s an admission that they are opening their entire page for a single purpose — “making the case” for Donald Trump. It’s a decision that demeans not just the writers who normally appear in that space, but the board’s own editorials. It’s a statement and a position that isn’t just intrinsically and intentionally biased, but deeply harmful to journalism as a whole. It’s a statement that a news source must apologize for telling the truth—for giving their best, considered opinion— if there are people who don’t like it.
That decision is simply poisonous. Unsupportable in any sense.
Will the New York Times miss whatever level of traffic gets directed from this column on Sunday mornings? Almost certainly not. And I apologize if one of your favorites was left on the cutting room floor.
Now come on in. Let’s read other people.
Sunday, Jan 21, 2018 · 3:37:11 PM +00:00
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Mark Sumner
Just to be clear about the policy of not using the New York Times on the Sunday APR, this doesn’t represent any broader Daily Kos policy. I’m just speaking for myself, just this morning, about how I intend to deal with the Times devaluing its own editorial page.
The Trump Shutdown
Richard Wolffe on the deep thinking behind the shutdown.
Today’s Republican party is built on principle. As a matter of principle, the GOP believes it is the only party that can shut down government as a negotiating tactic. The Democrats’ job is to keep that government open and to cave in to its demands.
These truths we hold to be self-evident, after watching several rounds of this sad kabuki theater through the Clinton and Obama years.
Now that the Democrats have triggered a government shutdown, Republicans are outraged. Because of their principles, you know.
Even the idea that Democrat’s “triggered” this shutdown is way off base. Trump ended DACA. Trump could revive the program with a pen-stroke, suspend persecution of dreamers with a word, or simply accept any of several bipartisan solutions that he — or John Kelly — turned away this week. Mitch McConnell’s tweet handing Democrats a Sophie’s Choice was the perfect image of how Democrats are not to blame. It would have cost Republicans nothing to support both CHIP and DACA for at least the short term, and Democrats were prepared to make some genuinely painful concessions to protect those two groups of children. But Republicans, and specifically Trump, were so intent on torturing someone, that they literally left Democrats with no viable choice.
Wolffe’s point is that Republicans are hypocrites who are attacking Democrats for doing ‘what they did’ in 2013. Only that’s not true. Republicans caused the shutdown in 2013 by turning the continuing resolution into a means of attacking programs and people. Which is exactly what they’ve done in 2018.
Donald Trump: Year One
Leonard Pitts and how far we are from 2016.
In January of 1998, reports surfaced of a sexual affair between President Bill Clinton and a 24-year old White House intern. It would mushroom into the biggest story of the year.
In January of 2018, reports surfaced of an alleged payoff by lawyers for the present president to silence a porn star from talking about their alleged sexual affair. It wasn’t even the biggest story of the day.
I still hold to the belief that Donald Trump is as likely to leave office because of MeToo as Mueller, but the lack of outrage over this story is jaw-dropping. The biggest reason is that the national media has developed a case of Trump-triggered ADHD, one that makes them unable to concentrate on any story longer than thirty minutes and unwilling to devote time to following up an issue rather than chasing the next pretty, pretty butterfly.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more visceral illustration of how our sensibilities have been bludgeoned into submission in the last year. Surprises no longer surprise. Shocks no longer shock. We have bumped up against the limits of human bandwidth, find ourselves unable to take it all in.
One simply cannot keep up with, much less respond with proper outrage to, all of this guy’s scandals, bungles, blame-shifting, name-calling and missteps, his sundry acts of mendacity, misanthropy, perversity and idiocy. It’s like trying to fill a teacup from Niagara Falls. It’s like trying to read the Internet.
If all that sounds hopeless, Pitts also includes this note.
… he’s galvanized a powerful resistance that has claimed upset victories from Alabama to Wisconsin and left Gumby-spined Republicans looking over their shoulders. That resistance might even save this country, assuming the guy leaves us anything to save.
That resistance was beautifully visible in 327 cities where organized marches were held yesterday, and in towns and locations that didn’t make that list, and in still more places where the resistance will march today.
Jill Abramson expresses a very similar hope.
The question at the heart of Trump’s first year isn’t how awful a president he has been, but how long the damage he has done – to the fabric of American life and the country’s standing in the world – will last.
Much of the harm will be impossible to erase. The rightwing judges he has appointed, and will appoint, enjoy lifetime tenure. As uranium mining resumes on once protected national lands, the poisons that seep into the earth and water do lasting damage to the environment. Countries that considered the US an ally and protector have already looked elsewhere (or inward) for support. If Trump provokes North Korea and acts on the threat to use his bigger button, who knows what could happen? (“Anything but that.”)
Even if the United States was to somehow put someone with reasonable views into office tomorrow, what nation would be anxious to strike a long-term deal with America on the environment, or the military, or the economy, knowing that at any moment the government might be replaced with people with no experience, no knowledge, and no intention but to wreck the work of their predecessor?
What is the antidote to despair? There is, perhaps, one glimmer of hope. Trump could provide a positive jolt to the body politic. His galvanisation of women’s energy may be even more profound than if Hillary Clinton had defeated him.
That’s nice and all… but let’s get Trump and the rest of the Republicans out, then weigh whether being galvanized makes up for years of abuse.
Ruth Marcus on the loneliness of the long distance tyrant.
I alone can fix it. There are two ways of reading this slightly ambiguous sentence. First, in the way that Trump presumably meant it, that he is the one uniquely capable of fixing what is broken in Washington and politics. Second, that he could fix it alone, that is, without allies and alliances. Either of these meanings is false, dangerously so, and each has helped to land us in the present mess.
There would be no shutdown without Trump. The whole series of events that brought us to this point were generated through Trump’s joy at attacking all things Obama and his inability to sustain support for an idea longer than the time it takes someone else to whisper in his ear.
Far from being the exclusive savior of his imagining, President Trump is exceptionally ill-suited to the task of fixing our fractured politics. He has no perspective, no patience and no knowledge of what that might take. The art of the possible is different from the art of the deal, even assuming Trump deserves the credit he has awarded himself for being a canny businessman. You need to understand how Washington functions to make it more functional.
In this sense, it was instructive that the self-proclaimed drainer of the Washington swamp recently discovered that eliminating earmarks, the very essence of swampiness, might have made deal-cutting more difficult. Surprise! Governing is more complicated than Campaign Trail Trump ever acknowledged or, more likely, understood.
If Trump would just conduct himself in the Oval Office as he really has in business for the last decade — making a song and dance and turning away while other people use his company to move funds around — we’d be considerably better off.
Puerto Rico
Yarimar Bonilla on the reception Americans from Puerto Rico are getting as they move away from their storm-ravaged home.
Since Hurricane Maria, nearly 300,000 Puerto Ricans have left for Florida alone. At first, most of those leaving were elderly, disabled or in need of critical medical care. Now planes are leaving full of young people economically stranded in the post-Maria landscape. These departures will only compound the already historic migratory wave caused by the island’s fiscal crisis, possibly resulting in an overall 25 percent population loss by the end of the decade.
It’s easy to blame the island’s government for some of that fiscal collapse, but Puerto Rico has been subject to a back and forth, herky-jerky treatment from Congress that’s made it impossible to predict future revenues, or make timely investments in infrastructure, or address debts.
With electricity still unavailable in many areas, water still unsafe, and many normal segments of the economy still sidelined, jobs are hard to come by on the island. But Americans moving from Puerto Rico to the mainland are finding something that may be surprising.
In a political climate dominated by xenophobia and the politics of closed borders, one might expect that an influx of Latino evacuees to the mainland would be unwelcome. However, throughout the United States evacuees are sought after and even recruited. In the face of expected labor shortages caused by President Trump’s anti-immigration policies, many employers are eager to hire bilingual workers for whom the minimum wage of a U.S. state represents a significant boost in income.
On one hand, there’s some hope in that statement, but it’s yet another reminder of just how unfair and uneven the laws are for those Americans who still live on Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands.
Journalism
Thomas Hughes and Jodie Ginsberg on a threat that’s much bigger than being called “fake news.”
The denigration of independent media is not limited to presidential Twitter trolling. If it were, we might not be visiting the US this week on an unprecedented joint international press freedom mission.
The fabric of press freedom in the US has been frayed and weakened by political stigmatisation of journalists and cries of “fake news”, but it risks much greater, and more permanent, damage from other forces, including harassment, detention and criminalisation.
Journalists are facing an unprecedented and unrelenting crackdown on their work that appears to come more from the playbook of dictatorial demagogues than constitutional caretakers. This crackdown is at its most visible when it intersects with protest.
This isn’t something that’s happened once or twice. This isn’t uninformed officers, or isolated officials making a mistake. It’s happening at Standing Rock. It’s happening with Black Lives Matter. It’s happening wherever citizens resist white nationalist groups. It’s happening around the resistance, period.
Targeted harassment, stigmatisation, and detention of journalists fosters an environment of fear that shuts down debate. All these factors feed and fuel each other. Stigmatisation by public officials and politicians gives police and other authorities the impetus and invitation to make life more difficult for journalists, and so the harassment and detention escalate, preventing independent journalists from being able to do their job, which is often by definition a cause of frustration for those in power. It’s a check and balance that is vital to democracy.
Police Violence
The Washington Post on a shooting by Park Police.
Is it possible that the U.S. Park Police simply don’t have enough to do? Or that they hunger for more action than is usually available in their quotidian diet of patrols at national monuments, speeding tickets on verdant parkways and crowd control at occasional protests?
Could that be what possessed two Park Police officers to hit their patrol car’s siren and emergency lights, give chase and ultimately open fire on an unarmed motorist whose “offense” was to have driven away after his vehicle was rear-ended in a fender bender on the George Washington Memorial Parkway in November? The man, Bijan Ghaisar, a 25-year-old accountant from McLean, was hit three times in the head. He died 10 days later.
How did someone who was on the receiving end of a minor accident, end up dead by police who chased him down and shot him in his vehicle? The park police haven’t said. The FBI hasn’t said. No one has said.
That’s chilling and an abdication of the most basic obligations of accountability in a democracy. Why haven’t the officers who fired their weapons at Mr. Ghaisar been identified? Have they been suspended? Are they still patrolling the GW Parkway? Should drivers on the parkway be worried that they too may be shot in the head if they are rear-ended and drive away?
Environment
The Washington Post on something else happening while everyone is focused on the shutdown.
According to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, last year was one of the warmest years on record — second or third, depending on which agency’s records you examine, because each has its own method for its calculations. One reason it may not have topped 2016, the warmest year ever, was the presence then of a warming El Niño, a regular phenomenon the lack of which does not indicate that the planet is coping with radical, human-induced changes in the atmosphere’s chemistry.
One warm year is not necessarily cause for concern. The trend, however, is. The past three years were the warmest three ever recorded. The five warmest years in the record all came since 2010. Seventeen of the 18 warmest years in the data came since 2001. This decade is on track to be warmer than the 2000s, which were warmer than the 1990s, and so on. The heating of the Earth is unmistakable.
Miscellaneous
David Von Drehle urges Trump to see a national park. Soon.
The population of the United States in 2016 was an estimated 323 million, and the number of National Park system visitors was more than 330 million. So I’ll venture that most of us have a favorite national park moment. …
Presidency 101: If you can’t find common ground in the national parks, you’re guilty of leadership malpractice.
So what are we to make of the mass resignation last week from the National Park Service Advisory Board? With everything going on in this uneasy world, why make the parks a battleground?
Because Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke doesn’t believe in the whole concept of public land. And if he has to sell mining rights to Old Faithful to prove it, he’ll have the contract ready by Monday. There’s nothing the park board — people who were actually interested in public land, public health, and public good — had to say that either Zinke or Trump wanted to hear.
Tension at Interior is nothing new. Among other assignments, the department manages the lion’s share of the 640 million acres of federally owned land in the United States. Mining, drilling, grazing and water interests clash with conservationists over access to this bounty. It’s no surprise that conservative Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke would ruffle some feathers by embracing pro-extraction policies unlike those of the Obama years.
What feels new is the needless antagonism of Park Service stewards. Most of the advisory board members who submitted resignations were near the end of their terms anyway. The Trump administration will soon choose its own candidates to control the board. If Zinke had managed an orderly transition, instead of giving the board the back of his hand, he could have signaled a continuity of purpose in sharing and caring for the crown jewels of America’s heritage.
Zinke sent exactly the signal he wanted.
Carl Hiaasen provides a handy list for the next time you’re paying off a porn star.
6. Don’t promise to put her on your reality TV show, then not do it. …
13. Do not, under any circumstances, drag out negotiations in order to delay paying the money. You can’t treat a prominent porn actress the same way you treat your electricians and drywall contractors. If she asks for $130,000, cough up the damn $130,000. ...
15. When transferring hush money to a porn star, don’t do it in a way that can be traced by the Wall Street Journal a year later, when you’re sitting in the Oval Office. Consider filling a suitcase with cash instead of wiring the funds to a client-trust account at City National Bank in Los Angeles. …
19. Don’t assume she’s not really writing a book.
Kathleen Parker on Trump’s ongoing mission to make the worst possible appointments.
If the name Taylor Weyeneth rings a tiny bell in your head, then you might be related to him. Otherwise, the 24-year-old was until a week ago an unknown if powerful member of the Trump administration: deputy chief of staff in the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Weyeneth’s qualifications for the job, which falls under the executive branch and spends hundreds of millions to fight illegal drugs and manage the opioid crisis, are essentially nil. As reported in The Post, he did lose a relative to a heroin overdose and was very moved, making him uniquely qualified for no job whatsoever. His professional experience consisted of working on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and, before that, working for a family firm that processed health products such as chia seeds, which is a spiffy résumé item if you’re aiming to make smoothies at Whole Foods.
And now this 24-year-old, who has never managed anyone or anything, has control of a large staff and a budget in excess of a billion. And he has tens of thousands of people whose lives are on the line. But Trump doesn’t care about finding the right person. He cares about who will swear loyalty.
Thus, people such as Weyeneth get important jobs for which they’re unqualified and accrue power wildly disproportionate to their talents or experience.