Rest in Peace, John Dingell. he was a twitter superstar as a second career, and this might be my fav:
Susan J. Demas/Michigan Advance:
If we ever get single-payer health care, thank John Dingell
Medicare, the Clean Air Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Endangered Species Act, the auto bailout, the Clean Water Act — none of these landmark laws would be here were it not for the feisty and brutally honest Democrat from greater Detroit.
“Over the course of the longest congressional career in history, John led the charge on so much of the progress we take for granted today,” President Barack Obama noted.
But I think if Dingell had been asked to choose the issue closest to his heart, it would have been health care. And it wouldn’t even be close.
“Having no health insurance was always a matter of terror to people I knew, because most of ’em were about one sickness away from destitution,” he told me in 2012. “And people died for lack of health care or insurance.”
You did, sir. You did.
Edward-Isaac Dovere/Atlantic:
Bernie Sanders Is Ready to Rumble
The Vermont senator thinks he clears the crowded Democratic field and then beats Trump for president in 2020.
“Nothing unifies Democrats like being made a villain by Trump,” said one Sanders ally.
The Vermont senator has been huddling with staff in meetings and phone calls over the last few weeks, chewing over plans. Barring a surprise last minute change of heart, he will jump in for the 2020 race, convinced he can win, according to people familiar with his plans. His spokeswoman, Arianna Jones, did not return a request for comment on Sanders’s plans.
We’ll see.
ICYMI, the piece from Bezos in Medium is here:
No thank you, Mr. Pecker
A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker’s apoplexy, we were approached, verbally at first, with an offer. They said they had more of my text messages and photos that they would publish if we didn’t stop our investigation.
My lawyers argued that AMI has no right to publish photos since any person holds the copyright to their own photos, and since the photos in themselves don’t add anything newsworthy.
AMI’s claim of newsworthiness is that the photos are necessary to show Amazon shareholders that my business judgment is terrible. I founded Amazon in my garage 24 years ago, and drove all the packages to the post office myself. Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people, just finished its most profitable year ever, even while investing heavily in new initiatives, and it’s usually somewhere between the #1 and #5 most valuable company in the world. I will let those results speak for themselves.
OK, back to their threat to publish intimate photos of me. I guess we (me, my lawyers, and Gavin de Becker) didn’t react to the generalized threat with enough fear, so they sent this:
followed of course by this:
Sophomoric? Far more than that. It’s the Boggart-Banishing Spell (Riddikulus):
a charm that is used in defence against a Boggart. It causes the creature to assume a form that is humorous to the caster, along with a whip-crack noise, thereby counteracting the Boggart's ability to terrorise.
Boggarts are defeated by laughter, so forcing them to assume an amusing form is the first step to defeating them
Never thought I’d see it used in real life. And, boy, was it needed (WaPo):
Ronan Farrow said Thursday that he and “at least one other prominent journalist” who had reported on the National Enquirer and President Trump received blackmail threats from the tabloid’s parent company, American Media Inc., over their work.
Farrow’s allegation came just hours after Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos published a remarkable public post on Medium accusing the National Enquirer of attempting to extort and blackmail him by threatening to publish intimate photos unless he stopped investigating the publication. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
In a tweet Thursday night, Farrow wrote that he and the unnamed journalist “fielded similar ‘stop digging or we’ll ruin you’ blackmail efforts from AMI.” Last April, Farrow published a story in the New Yorker about the Enquirer’s “catch and kill” practice — in which stories are buried by paying off sources — that benefited Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Too true, it will all come out:
Max Boot/WaPo:
Much remains mysterious about the Enquirer’s actions, and in particular its connections, if any, with President Trump and the government of Saudi Arabia — a possibility that Bezos alluded to in his blog post. Both the Saudis and Trump are aggrieved at The Post, and Trump wrongly blames Bezos for the newspaper’s accurate but unflattering coverage of him. When the Enquirer’s initial article about Bezos’s extramarital relationship was published, the president gloated in a tweet: “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!”
The president would obviously love to see a sale of The Post to a friendlier owner — perhaps Trump pal David Pecker, the chairman and chief executive of AMI. (One is reminded of autocrats such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who have benefited from bullying media organizations into submission in their own countries.) The Enquirer was threatening Bezos in order to get him to affirm that its coverage was not “politically motivated or influenced by political forces.” Might the Enquirer have, at a minimum, pursued the story to curry favor with Trump?
NY Times on the ongoing Mueller investigation:
The transcript makes clear that Mr. Gates, who pleaded guilty to two felonies and has been cooperating with prosecutors for a year, was a key source of information about Mr. Manafort, Mr. Kilimnik and other issues central to their inquiry.
For instance, it was apparently Mr. Gates who revealed to prosecutors that Mr. Manafort had ordered Trump campaign polling data to be sent to Mr. Kilimnik as Mr. Trump was clinching the Republican nomination in spring 2016. The New York Times has reported that Mr. Manafort wanted Mr. Kilimnik to pass the data to two oligarchs who had financed Ukrainian political parties aligned with Russia.
Kurt Bardella/USA Today:
The Trump investigations are coming at last. Can Republicans handle the truth?
After all, the mission statement Republicans recited at the start of every single oversight committee hearing they presided over declared, ”Americans have a right to know that the money Washington takes from them is well spent. … Our solemn responsibility is to hold government accountable to taxpayers, because taxpayers have a right to know what they get from their government. We will work tirelessly, in partnership with citizen watchdogs, to deliver the facts to the American people.”
Apparently, what they forgot to add to that “mission statement” were the words, “And this mission only applies to the first black president.”
Peter Suderman/NY Times:
Why Is the Republican Party So Confused About Health Care?
The G.O.P. needs to finally figure out, or at least start figuring out, exactly what it stands for on health care policy.
The empty mantra of “repeal and replace” — which was all but buried by the midterms — was never a stand-in for an actual shared vision for the governance of health care in the United States. At the moment, the party seems confused about what, exactly, American health care policy should look like.
That confusion extends beyond Obamacare to Medicare (which President Trump has ruled off limits) and Medicaid (which the repeal bills tried and failed to restructure), as well as to the tax deduction for employer-sponsored insurance around which health care policy has contorted for so many decades.
Some media giants have ethics issues. Raw Story:
Christian publishing company owned by News Corp found guilty of significant fraud and destroying evidence
“HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc. is the world’s largest Christian content provider, with more than three hundred years of publishing expertise,” says the CEO’s page on the Harper’s website. “We are a values-driven organization, working toward a single mission: “We inspire the world by meeting the needs of people with content that promotes biblical principles and honors Jesus Christ.”
The publishing company is a fully-owned subsidiary of News Corp, the company that also owns Fox News and formerly News International. Fox has had its own legal troubles over the years with sexual harassment, and News International was caught illegally hacking cellular phones in the U.K.
“During the litigation, a similar pattern of misconduct was revealed, with HarperCollins [Christian] allowing evidence to be destroyed and not disclosing the loss until compelled to do so,” the release said.