“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”...Elsewhere in the NYT, there's a news analysis piece by Dan Barry arguing in favor of using the word "lie" in regular news articles when reporting on things Trump and his people say. You may remember that yesterday, I was critical of the NYT for saying "President Trump reiterated his false claim that at least three million illegal immigrants cast ballots for Hillary Clinton..." I said:
“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” Mr. Bannon said of the election, calling it “a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.”
“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Mr. Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” (He did not name specific reporters or editors.) “That’s why you have no power,” Mr. Bannon added. “You were humiliated.”...
On the telephone, Mr. Bannon spoke in blunt but calm tones, peppered with a dose of profanities, and humorously referred to himself at one point as “Darth Vader.” He said, with ironic relish, that Mr. Trump was elected by a surge of support from “the working class hobbits and deplorables.”...
Asked if he was concerned that Mr. Spicer had lost credibility with the news media, Mr. Bannon chortled. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “We think that’s a badge of honor. ‘Questioning his integrity’ — are you kidding me? The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence, and no hard work.”
“You’re the opposition party,” Mr. Bannon said. “Not the Democratic Party. You’re the opposition party. The media’s the opposition party.... The paper of record for our beloved republic, The New York Times, should be absolutely ashamed and humiliated."
I disapprove of the use of the phrase "false claim" in a news article. Trump deserves criticism if he is purporting to know things that he does not know, but the NYT is also asserting that it knows something it does not know. Trump's allegation could be true. How can you know for certain without a thorough investigation?Barry is talking about a NYT headline with the word "lie" — "Trump Repeats Lie About Popular Vote in Meeting With Lawmakers." He recognizes that to say "lie" is to purport to know what is inside Trump's head, that he meant to say what he knew was false. But:
For [Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times], the question of intent was resolved, given that Mr. Trump had made the same assertion two months earlier through his preferred mode of communication, the tweet: “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”What? How is repeating an assertion absolute proof that he knows it's false? Barry's argument just doesn't make sense to me. He stresses how important it is to get people to see how terrible lies are but shows little concern about preserving the newspaper's reputation for professionalism and strict adherence to evidence. I'm just a humble blogger and I'm doing free-wheeling commentary and horsing around and I still always follow a rule against making an assertion of fact about something I don't know. I love to write about what other people might be thinking, but I use words to show that I'm speculating. I can't believe professional journalists don't follow what I regard as a minimal standard.
Barry ends his piece with a quote from Sara Brady, "a crisis-communications specialist based in Florida":
“The media run the risk of being disrespectful to the president of the United States,” she said. “But the problem is: If he doesn’t get called out in some way, we as Americans are never going to know what’s true and what’s not.”Barry is acting as though the conflict for journalists is between being respectful to the President and respecting the facts. But if journalists would just be rigorous about the facts and only the facts, it would all work out. The real conflict — which Barry won't see or won't admit (is he lying?!) — is between strictly reporting the facts and wanting to smack the President around. By indulging in the urge to hurt the President, the paper succumbs to political activism.
Ironically, that empowers Trump.
पोस्ट्स
१९० टिप्पण्या:
I'm all for the NYT using immoderate language in headlines. The biggest lie they've told over the years is they're impartial.
As a response to the LameStream Media© and their continued over-the-top hysterics since the election, I'd like to quote their Obamessiah, Barack the Eloquent, the Lightworker, who halted the ocean's rise...
"I won"
The NYT is still proud of the award given to Walter Duranty.
Talk about lies.
Every day they lose more credibility.
Even Fox is getting into the act as Shepard Smith was interviewing Jindal on a cop ambush killing and chastised Jindal for saying "All lives matter."
They are really taking the bait.
Steve Bannon is absolutely correct. What he understands, and the MSM is incapable of understanding, is that at least 1/2 of the citizens of the U.S. do not think of them as brave warriors standing up for the little guy against the forces of darkness. They think of them as a tool used to oppress the little guy and prop up the powerful.
Fighting with the press empowers Trump because the people he represents can see that the press detests them.
What a truly miserable human being Bannon must be. I'm glad this was posted! And yes, call Trump a liar when he lies. Use the words liar and lie. And be respectful of the facts. Trump is gaslighting, trying to play a Putin and see if he can get rid of the press. It won't work here.
Agree 100% with Bannon. A subtext here is that a former Goldman Sachs guy is dissing the NYT. He used to work and live with these NYT people and he knew they were clueless back then. The dishonesty, incompetence and advocacy is mostly new.
The battle is joined.
Aside 1. A buddy met with the NYT editorial board back in the 80's. He described them as hippies.
Aside 2. Watched a little bit of a panel with Wolf, Gloria Borger and other Libs. Insane and unhinged is the only way to describe their discussion.
FWIW, the New York Times' official statement on Walter Duranty.
The real conflict — which Barry won't see or won't admit (is he lying?!) — is between strictly reporting the facts and wanting to smack the President around. By indulging in the urge to hurt the President, the paper succumbs to political activism.
APPLAUSE
Anyway, the NYT's priority isn't to speak truth to power, its to function as a propaganda organ for Carlos Slim.
http://fortune.com/2016/11/10/mexico-trump-slim-peso/
http://www.mexiconewsnetwork.com/news/importance-remittances-mexico/
sunsong said..."What a truly miserable human being Bannon must be. I'm glad this was posted! And yes, call Trump a liar when he lies. Use the words liar and lie. And be respectful of the facts. Trump is gaslighting, trying to play a Putin and see if he can get rid of the press. It won't work here."
Right. And I'm sure you felt the same way when Obama and his administration lied about Obamacare, Benghazi, the IRS targeting conservatives, his Iran deal, and on and on and on...
Your attitude is why the Left lost, and will continue to lose. Enjoy, sucker...
subsong wrote: It won't work here.
Sorry to break the news to you this way, buttercup, but take a look around.
It did.
Do dah ditto.
Watched a little bit of a panel with Wolf, Gloria Borger and other Libs. Insane and unhinged is the only way to describe their discussion.
Sunsong shows just how crazy the left is. It is amazing they can't see it. A few Democrats seems to be getting a clue as they have told David Brock to "Please stop helping us. You're killing us."
The McGovern wing of the Dims is in control and they have devastated their farm teams.
California is almost gone after the GOP has basically packed up and moved out, like me.
Was this standing up for the little guy?
http://time.com/3768536/indiana-pizza-no-gay-wedding/
Anyway, the NYT's priority isn't to speak truth to power, its to function as a propaganda organ for Carlos Slim.
It's like Señior Slim has a vested interest in the status quo down south, or something...
And I'm sure you felt the same way when Obama and his administration lied about Obamacare, Benghazi,
Actually I did feel the same way about Obama's lies. Even railed about them here on this very blog. Big difference - Trump lies about 70% of the time. You can count Obama's lies on your fingers and toes. It's time to call a lie a lie, imo.
I've read comments and new stories on the ABC News interview where Trump again talked about millions of non-citizens voting and referenced the pew research report on it. I went and read the report, and read quotes in the media today from one of the authors.
The quoted author says the study "Does not support" Trumps statements - and the media are using that to say he's wrong. But that's NOT what the author was saying. The study was an online survey that showed between 2.2-6.4% (I'm going off memory from earlier today) of voters were non-citizens based upon an online survey. That study is modest quality because its self-selected responders, an online survey, and no independent verification - but that just means more research is needed, not that Trump is wrong. I've seen far more news articles stating "blueberries reduce risk of cancer" on far weaker correlative data than that.
There is evidence out there right now, in a peer reviewed and respected publication, that a sizable amount of non-citizens are voting. If either of the extremes of the ranges are correct, it would represent millions of votes. That study has not been dis-proven, it's simply a flawed study design. No one knows if it's right, wrong, and in which direction.
Yet the Media is deliberately and perniciously reporting it as the author says Trump is wrong.
Like you said, the media should report the facts. What I'm concerned about is that this has been going on for so long, and is so "mainstream" now in the media, that I'm not sure if they even see it anymore. They don't seem to understand that taking sides in a disagreement is not representing facts - that maybe both sides don't have "facts" but instead have arguments.
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
TreeJoe
The new US Attorneys will investigate and then prosecute cases in CA, IL, NC and NY. There will be convictions.
"What? How is repeating an assertion absolute proof that he knows it's false? Barry's argument just doesn't make sense to me. He stresses how important it is to get people to see how terrible lies are but shows little concern about preserving the newspaper's reputation for professionalism and strict adherence to evidence." Why should he? He is not in the business of "professionalism." He is in the business of serving up the right narrative to his prog market niche.
"I can't believe professional journalists don't follow what I regard as a minimal standard."Oh, no! Not that "I can't believe" faux-surprise shtick again!
But, speaking strictly and philosophically, the NYT, following AA guidance, does need a word other than lie. I suggest bullshit. DJT is a bullshitter, in the sense that he makes assertions without caring about their truth or being indifferent to it. Of course, those assertions may be effective in other ways, truth not being the prime political virtue.
respect my authoriah!
drama
"...a crisis-communications specialist"
"Crisis-communications specialist".
Wtf is a "crisis-communications specialist"?
Does that have something to do with, I dunno, "crisis actors" or something?
I fear for my life if we don't exit Clown World soon. I'm going to die laughing at these people.
Some lies they should ignore altogether, such as the assertions about crowd size. There are far more important things. Why even signal boost such inane statements?
Other lies, like the one about vote fraud, need to be called out as the lies they are. But even there, the media should not allow itself to be taken in by ridiculous tweets and statements. Ignore the shiny objects and just focus on the bills and executive orders in play.
Your conclusion echoes what Glenn Reynolds recently wrote in USA Today. The one thing the MSM must do, return to trustworthy and unbiased reporting, is the one thing they are not capable of.
Sunsong: "Actually I did feel the same way about Obama's lies"
Lefties rewriting history.
Could there be anything more predictable?
I think not.
Maybe we should call sunsong out on his/her stream of lies?
California is almost gone after the GOP has basically packed up and moved out, like me.
Here's how to fix CA and not deport anybody: impose a Federal surtax on all non-citizen employees, make the surtax about twice the minimum wage per year of full-time employment. Put extreme fines and penalties for non-compliance directly into the law, no shillyshallying up to language that allows activists judges room to trivialize the sanctions.
Illegals will go home as their employment here dries up, and California will be forced to recruit many ex-Californians back or lose their employment base. This will redress the extreme Democrat/GOP imbalance back to something like normality. (Man, that blows my mind — California and normality in the same paragraph.)
But if journalists would just be rigorous about the facts and only the facts, it would all work out.
Are you serious? You, and a good chunk of your commenters, don't want the facts. If Trump said tomorrow that the sky is fluorescent green, I'm sure you would write a long post about how we can't know exactly what Trump sees, so he is not lying, and any journalist or scientist who calls his statement inaccurate is being unfair.
Trump consistently makes up facts (if that is better than saying he lies). Yesterday, he claimed that Keystone XL would create 28,000 "great construction jobs". This number is pure fantasy. He can't even get his story straight on who cancelled the visit by the Mexican president.
The list of untruths, lies, alternate facts, misstatements, that Trump has uttered in his first week on the job is staggering. At what level will the bullshit get so deep that you will have to admit that Trump is alarmingly dishonest?
I don't think Trump is lying. I think he believes everything he says, or what he is manipulated into thinking. I believe the man is not of sound mind and there are those around him who are now running the country who would like to destroy it and rebuild it the way they see fit. They are extremists, or worse. It's time to seriously consider the 25th Amendment.
"Even Fox is getting into the act as Shepard Smith was interviewing Jindal on a cop ambush killing and chastised Jindal for saying "All lives matter."
They are really taking the bait."
Shepard Smith is not "Fox". I stopped watching him years ago.
Professor Althouse:
"How is repeating an assertion absolute proof that he knows it's false?" Where did the NYT say that it would only make an assertion based on "absolute proof"? Do you believe that is the standard that journalists should use before publishing anything or asserting anything? You argued in your previous post that the NYT should not call his claim a "false claim" because "Trump's allegation could be true. How can you know for certain without a thorough investigation?" Do you believe a newspaper should not report anything as fact unless there has been a thorough investigation? Should it never call something false that "could be true"? Is that how you approach epistemology? Is that how newspapers should approach it? It's a completely unreasonable standard.
Any newspaper that held itself to that standard would be so anodyne as to be unreadable. I bet you would absolutely hate reading such a paper.
It's your blog, and of course you can do what you want with it (and I of course can stop reading it). However, your skeptical textual readings of the New York Times are starting to get boring (I think we all know to consume any media with the writers point-of-view in mind)--and I always thought boring was what you considered the biggest sin.
Well, by definition the media can't keep its mouth shut for a while. It has to talk or write - that's its only function. If Bannon means there should be a little less opinion and a little more reporting, his comment may be more reasonable.
"...a crisis-communications specialist"
The problem with crisis-communications specialists is that there is an upper limit to how many times they are believed. You may ask the Boy Who Cried Wolf about that.
The NYT exceeded that limit awhile back, hence President Trump.
NYT email ads running now offer 40% off on the truth, as they put it.
Brian Ross at ABC - he still has a job, and he's a total hack who reports lies and falsehoods.
I could go on an on.... This isn't just about the media dissing Trump. the media are a wholly owned subsidiary to one political party. The Democrats.
Any newspaper that held itself to that standard would be so anodyne as to be unreadable.
LawGuy5000 must get his news along with his Froot-Loops.
News is a business whose product is audience, and the audience doesn't want hard news.
There's no market for hard news.
So you will never get hard news.
The best you can do is ridicule the news business so that at least the 80% of the population that doesn't believe them no longer even believes their choice of topic, either.
What Steve Bannon gets right, is that the mainstream media didn't get it; they didn't see a Trump win as a real possibility.
What Donald Trump gets wrong, is that his win wasn't any sort of a "landslide" (Trump's word). I don't know if Steve Bannon imagines that it was a landslide. I expect Bannon is smarter and more realistic than that.
The reason for mentioning Trump's view of a landslide, apart from the fact that it was mentioned explicitly in this blog post, is that Trump will absolutely need to work with his Republican Congress. And of all the people in the Trump Administration, I suspect that the one person and power center that is most hostile to the Republican Congressional leadership, is Steve Bannon.
It's a real problem for us that we don't have a nonpartisan and professional news industry any more. If we had gotten accurate news about what was going on during the Obama Administration, many of the lies and abuses of power could have been identified in time to do something about them: Lies about Obamacare, lies about the IRS's abuse of its power over the Tea Party, lies about Benghazi. I'm worried that the Trump Administration will also lie and abuse its power, but by now the news industry has no credibilty to tell us about these things.
And they think they can regain their credibility by calling things Trump says "lies"?
The sad part is that the market for news debunkers and bloggers will disappear too, once the news biz is discredited as soap opera.
Maybe a video made Nieto cancel the meeting?
Since we are all about truth....
Freder wrote: If Trump said tomorrow that the sky is fluorescent green, I'm sure you would write a long post about how we can't know exactly what Trump sees, so he is not lying, and any journalist or scientist who calls his statement inaccurate is being unfair.
An unfortunate piece of rhetoric arising from — shall we say, cultural myopia? Depending on your language the sky is green.
Yesterday Carol Costello on CNN stated point blank that "the intelligence services prepared the dossier".
Lefties complaining about obviously fake news?
Approximately ZERO.
I think people want real news without all the injected bias and opinion.
This is why ALL opinion polls show that most Americans do not trust the media.
If you want facts about the election, we KNOW that some 130 million votes were cast. There is reason to believe that some of those votes were cast illegally because studies have shown that some non-citizens have registered to vote, some people maintain voter registration in more than one state, and the voter rolls are not maintained scrupulously to remove dead folks. We also know that there are instances where people fraudulently get absentee ballots for other voters, and that control over absentee and early voting is not perfect. Does that add up to 3 million fraudulent votes? Personally, I doubt it approaches that magnitude, but I supecect it is a non-trivial number. IF the matter were carefully investigated, we'd have the facts to say whether Trump, or the media, is correct in their assertions of what they think such an investigation would reveal. But I'm with the Professor -- the statements from the media that Trump is telling a lie go far beyond what the media can actually establish as the truth.
"If you like your doctor . . . . ."
So the new meme seems to be that Trump is out of his mind. Maybe he is, but it still won't put Hillary Clinton in the White House. Nice try, kids.
I read the WSJ everyday almost without fail. The WSJ is part of the MSM. Bannon is talking out his ass.
"harrogate said...
Other lies, like the one about vote fraud, need to be called out as the lies they are."
Hey, post your proof that his assertions are lies. We all would be excited to see them.
ARM,
The WSJ is part of the MSM.
You speak truth and don't even know it.
The argument that there was systematic fraud in large Democratic states is nutty. Why would anyone make such an effort when the outcome was already a certainty? If there was going to be any fraud it would have been in Republican controlled swing states, where it could have made a difference. Trump and Bannon are effectively impuning Republican governors with this nonsense.
There is hard news and there is a market for it. Not a huge market arguably.
Pull up the inside pages of the NYT and much of the WSJ or the AP feed (much of which you will find in the NYT and WSJ) and Bloomberg, etc. you will get a reasonably good range of hard news. If you look at foreign papers and sources you will get a lot more.
But little of it will get fed into the US media megaphones, CNN talking heads and network news.
This is why ALL opinion polls show that most Americans do not trust the media.
Thought you didn't trust opinion polls either.
"Actually I did feel the same way about Obama's lies."
How about Hillary's ?
How about Susan Rice's ?
Kerry's ?
Harry Reid's ?
"It's a real problem for us that we don't have a nonpartisan and professional news industry any more."
In politics, there have never been professional nonpartisan newspapers. Look at the Civil War period. What we had was multiple newspapers with different POV and politics.
The TV stations gave an illusion of nonpartisan but Cronkite was always leaning left. The only right leaning guy I can think of was David Brinkley and he kept "This Week" pretty much on even keel but he died and ABC turned it over to Clintonopolis.
What we don't have anymore is an educated electorate. History is nonexistent in college, let alone high school.
When I was a bout 13, I found my cousin's high school "World History" textbook. It began with the Doric invasion and the Punic Wars.
In detail including all three Punic Wars. How many Harvard graduates do you think know anything about the Punic Wars or Cato the Elder? That was a high school textbook. I wish I had it now but I went off to college and it got lost.
Read a 6th grade reader from 1914 and tell me we have an educated electorate.
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC NYTimes, WaPo--- ALL biased hacks.
buwaya said...
But little of it will get fed into the US media megaphones, CNN talking heads and network news., FOX news, talk radio etc.
But only stupid people rely on those sources for news. And stupid people will believe anything. Some people even read the National Enquirer, view it as a legitimate news source and will quote from it approvingly.
At about 1:25 here you can hear Keith Ellison say “There’s no Republicans in the Fifth Congressional District at all. We have chased them all out.”
https://youtu.be/A9wIwhGJMEw
Now this is a lie. Ellison's GOP opponent garnered 23% of the vote in 2016.
Ellison is running for head of the DNC. How in the world can the Dems elect a liar like Ellison to a top party position?
The NY Times should put this story on page one.
Interesting juxtaposition. Kellyanne can be stifled. The NYTimes can't be.
"Why would anyone make such an effort when the outcome was already a certainty? "
Because the big money in these things are often State and local races.
And it doesn't require a lot of money, most of the infrastructure for this is already paid for through the ubiquitous phoney-baloney jobs, and you have to feed your machine anyway.
Der Sturmer am Hudson, and much of MSM, has long embraced the well-tested classic method of the Big Lie.
"But only stupid people rely on those sources for news."
That, and Facebook/Twitter/etc. What proportion of the populations is "stupid"?
Lewis said garnered.
AReasonableMan said...
The argument that there was systematic fraud in large Democratic states is nutty. Why would anyone make such an effort when the outcome was already a certainty? If there was going to be any fraud it would have been in Republican controlled swing states, where it could have made a difference. Trump and Bannon are effectively impuning Republican governors with this nonsense.
It's on, in Michigan. We have a mildly-competent good-soldier Republican Secretary of State, Ruth Johnson. She is distancing herself, if not denouncing, Trump's claim of vast "voter fraud."
We have a Trump-friendly (when it finally suited him) Republican Attorney General who is one of the most unctuous social climbers anyone has ever known. He (Bill Schuette -- pronounced "SHOOT-ee") is running for governor in 2018. And he is running away from the Trump comments.
With all my criticism of Trump's unending string of stupid comments, I have not gone after him on this one. I follow the Althouse analysis of this issue. What I criticize Trump for, is for being so reckless about it. He talks about "illegal aliens" voting (that is highly unlikely), and "dead people" and "voter fraud."
It is an argument that actually needs to be conducted very carefully on the data, and so of course Trump is incapable of handling it.
Here is how you do it, if you are a capable professional, and not Donald Trump:
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/07/the-threat-of-non-citizen-voting
"Some people even read the National Enquirer, view it as a legitimate news source and will quote from it approvingly.'
I respect them (The National Enquirer). They have a rather higher order of professional ethics than most of the others, and the humility to know their place. They have also, several times, broken stories being deliberately suppressed by their betters.
On the possibility of large-scale voter fraud, Conservative Treehouse linked to this video by voter fraud activist. It sounded pretty convincing about the possibility at least: https://goo.gl/ar6IPN
2008?
Now the press is all upset that Trump boarded Air Force One without waving goodbye to the assembled reporters.
Quelle horreur!
This is the guy who is writing those Executive Orders Trump is signing daily, that the the Legislative hasn't even seen first.
buwaya said...
Because the big money in these things are often State and local races.
And it doesn't require a lot of money, most of the infrastructure for this is already paid for through the ubiquitous phoney-baloney jobs, and you have to feed your machine anyway.
Can you provide some evidence for these assertions? And again, Republicans at local levels control many of the key elections. I live in a very blue state but a red town. No way the local Republicans just ignore fraud, if any existed.
"What Donald Trump gets wrong, is that his win wasn't any sort of a "landslide" (Trump's word)."
Go back and watch MSNBC 24 hours before the election was called, they predicted a landslide for Hillary assuming less electoral votes than Trump's final victory tally. 300+ electoral votes is a landslide.
Bannon, the guy who wrote Trump's inauguration speech. Trump is being manipulated by Bannon and others.
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC NYTimes, WaPo--- ALL biased hacks.
What about Fox? Or is only possible to be biased in one direction.
Cokie Roberts election night -They didn't listen to us.
bwaaaaaaaaaa
I disagree with the commentator above who said "your skeptical textual readings of the New York Times are starting to get boring" - they are NEVER boring, and I hope you keep doing them. They then provide fodder for me to send to the people losing their minds on the Twitstreambook who couldn't critically read anything the Paper of Record pronounces from on-high. Yay, Ann!
One massive trigger warning the next 4 years is.
Karina said...
"This is the guy who is writing those Executive Orders Trump is signing daily, that the the Legislative hasn't even seen first."
All Trump is doing is reversing Obama's executive orders that distorted laws already passed by Congress and signed by previous Presidents.
Chuck,
What percentage would you consider a landslide?
John Henry
The point of the illegal votes discussion is that the Democrats have now been talked into supporting a voter ID law. That will come after the investigation, which will undoubtedly uncover some vote fraud, and before the 2018 election.
They will complain and raise hell in the NYT but they opened the door with the Russian hacking theme.
By the way, the resignation of the Satte bureaucrats, which is making some news today, was a fake story.
DiploMadJanuary 26, 2017 at 3:15 PM
Senior always resign when a new president comes on board. It is up to the president to accept or reject those resignations. It appears the Trump team accepted the resignations. It's a fake crisis.
From a blog of retired FSOs.
What about Fox? Or is only possible to be biased in one direction.
Fox is drifting left now that the Murdoch kids are running it. Conquest's second law.
Freder Frederson said...
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC NYTimes, WaPo--- ALL biased hacks.
What about Fox? Or is only possible to be biased in one direction.
1/26/17, 4:52 PM
Fox does not claim to be unbiased (as far as I know). Instead they describe themselves as "fair and balanced."
ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC NYTimes, and WaPo will claim, to the end, that their news operations are unbiased and non-partisan.
Professor Althouse is being cute here claiming a moral high ground. She holds the media and left-wing politicians to a much higher bar than she holds the right. That's of course her moral and legal right. And I can imagine relatively innocuous reasons for that disparity. (Perhaps she is reacting against patterns she sees in the general intelligentsia? Or perhaps she's just commenting on what interests her, as it interests her.) And I can agree with her high standards, even if not with her reticence to impose them with consistency.
Whatever the reasons for her being so uneven in her consideration, Professor Althouse has turned her blog into a welcoming and fecund petri dish for zealots, no-nothings, and assholes of a decidedly anti-Christian, anti-liberty, anti-reflective variety. I'm hopeful that's not her intention (I don't know what's in her mind, of course), but I'd expect her to at least be aware of it.
"He talks about "illegal aliens" voting (that is highly unlikely)..."
Care to clarify that, Chuck? Are you really claiming that it's highly unlikely illegal aliens have voted in our elections?
This is not complicated.
According to bland ole' Wiki, there are 11 Million Illegal aliens in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_United_States
What states have the highest number of illegal aliens?
California
Texas
Florida
Illinois
New York
Arizona
Which state has one party Democrat rule? California
How many of these 11 Million illegal aliens have unlawfully registered to vote?
Probably, a lot. Dems refuse to permit an audit.
How many of these unlawfully registered voters actually cast ballots? Probably, a lot. That's why California is so blue.
There isn't a problem of illegal voting in most of the states of the union, because that's not where the illegal aliens are.
There is one problem state (my own), and anyone with a brain knows that California Dems make it too easy to register, and then stick their head in the sand as to the massive illegal voting.
Freder:
Re projected Pipeline jobs numbers, I bet though you believe this ridiculous CNN report re jobs:
"Congress has another reason not to roll back Obamacare too quickly: New research suggests that repealing two major provisions of Obamacare without replacing them right away could cost the nation 3 million jobs and trigger negative economic impacts that would extend far beyond the health care industry."
John said...
Chuck,
What percentage would you consider a landslide?
John Henry
Well, he didn't win a majority of the votes cast. He didn't even win a plurality of votes cast.
Trump won the electoral college. His win with the electoral college was comparatively narrow. It ranked about 46th on a list of "landslide" presidential electoral college wins. Out of 58 elections.
And Trump's particular path to his electoral college win was almost freakishly narrow, with close wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The clearly best and fairest way to characterize Trump's win is that it was a "very close" win. And not a "landslide."
Just one more reason to not trust or respect the NYT.
ARM,
"Can you provide some evidence for these assertions?"
Certainly. The problem is largely in big cities with big budgets and large tax revenues plus all sorts of other revenues from the Feds and the State and NGOs and Quangos.
Consider the scale of decisions and conflicts of interest the Los Angeles Unified School District alone deals with - and this is just one small conflict of interest scandal they've had. What is there everyone doesn't know about?
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/08/27/343549939/the-l-a-school-ipad-scandal-what-you-need-to-know
http://www.capoliticalreview.com/top-stories/lausd-blows-billions-on-construction/
How much is an LAUSD seat worth, in cashable favors and back-scratching and unofficial power basing?
""How is repeating an assertion absolute proof that he knows it's false?" Where did the NYT say that it would only make an assertion based on "absolute proof"?"
You're missing my context. For the incorrect statement to be a lie, Trump would have to know it was false. The NYT doesn't know that, so it shouldn't use the word "lie." "Lie" would only become an acceptable word if we knew for sure that Trump knew it was false, so it was wrong to use the word lie. Barry never explains how there is evidence sufficient to know what's in Trump's mind, so the inability to know another person's mind requires an accuracy-based reporter to refrain from using the word "lie." You just say Trump has not revealed the basis for his asserted belief, nor has our independent effort to find support for it located any. (Notice I wrote "asserted belief," because I don't know what Trump really believes. If he's lying, he doesn't believe it. I don't know whether or not he is lying.)
"Do you believe a newspaper should not report anything as fact unless there has been a thorough investigation? Should it never call something false that "could be true"?"
No. Of course not. I just want language that is scrupulous about what we know and don't know.
"It's your blog, and of course you can do what you want with it (and I of course can stop reading it). However, your skeptical textual readings of the New York Times are starting to get boring (I think we all know to consume any media with the writers point-of-view in mind)--and I always thought boring was what you considered the biggest sin."
I write about what I'm interested in. You can skip reading whatever you find boring the way I skip writing what I find boring.
Bannon clearly implied with his "and just listen for awhile" modifier to "keep its mouth shut" that the press needs to step back and look at how wrong they've been.
Instead, the headline drops five words and implies Trump wants a press blackout.
They just can't help themselves
Can I admit I never knew who Steve Bannon was, until this election, and now I love him to death?
He should be less blunt though. He'll be otherized if he doesn't tone it down.
"For the incorrect statement to be a lie, Trump would have to know it was false" is false on many common understandings of what it is to lie. For instance, almost everyone regards an incorrect statement as a lie even if the utterer only has a belief, perhaps unjustified, that it was false.
Moreover, "'Lie' would only become an acceptable word if we knew for sure that Trump knew it was false, so it was wrong to use the word lie" is false on virtually every understanding of the norms of discussion. I don't know what Professor Althouse means by "knew for sure," but we make attributions of mental states all the time on grounds far less than "knew for sure"--in fact, that's the standard in courtrooms, making Professor Althouse's error here surprising.
The bulletin the NYT issued through its phone app claimed Bannon "attacked the media as the 'opposition' and said it should 'keep its mouth shut'"
They left out the "and just listen for a while."
Bannon's obviously a feisty guy, and it might be a good thing if he'd tone things down a bit. But the quote in full, especially with the "and just listen for a while," suggests Bannon was prescribing what the media ought to do in order to its job properly.
The way the Times bulletin describes it makes it sound like Bannon thinks the media just shouldn't say anything (ever), which obviously sounds a good deal darker and more authoritarian.
They just can't help it.
… your skeptical textual readings of the New York Times are starting to get boring …
Boring? Then don’t read them. Readers, why do such simple solutions continue to elude the anti-Trumpers?
For me anytime the fucking NYT fake news chiselers are called out is like mother’s milk to a hungry baby. I drink long, deep and fall into happy bliss at that heavy teat. What’s boring is the absolute predictability of the failing rag.
I got the lifetime ban.
Must be on her second lifetime.
Trump will absolutely need to work with his Republican Congress …
By “Republican Congress,” I’m supposing Chuck means that pack of idiots who tried to defeat their own party’s presidential nominee. But Chuck has it backwards. If that Democrats’ cuckold Paul Ryan or the rest try to oppose Trump … me and millions like me will give those fucking idiots a lesson in Trump Politics. Those eGOP pussies will be roughly grabbed like they’ve never been grabbed before, THAT I can tell you.
Why would anyone make such an effort when the outcome was already a certainty?
Answer: Because it’s who they are and what they do. They’ve been cheating for so long that the cheating has become institutionalized and as such the cheating is part of their political DNA.
But they cannot cheat themselves a bogus victory if it’s a landslide. Even cheating cannot overcome a landslide – the best cheating can do in a landslide is make the election look like a closer election than it was – which is what just happened.
What we don't have anymore is an educated electorate. History is nonexistent in college, let alone high school.
Oh, history IS taught but it’s fucked up history carefully edited to make America look as bad as possible. What’s not taught anymore is love of country or any sort of patriotism. Academia these days is primarily concerned with inculcating young people with socialist/Progressive/Communist dogma. As a consequence our young people have no idea that they are privileged to live in the freest nation that has ever existed and because of that freedom, also the richest.
Fabi said...
"He talks about "illegal aliens" voting (that is highly unlikely)..."
Care to clarify that, Chuck? Are you really claiming that it's highly unlikely illegal aliens have voted in our elections?
Sure; there is credible information out there about "non-citizen voting." See that Heritage link I posted just above.
"Non-citizen" voting is not the same as "illegal alien" voting. Just personally, and anecdotally, I suspect that people who are here illegally are a lot less likely to vote than legal residents who work here legally and perhaps even own property here.
There could be some "illegal aliens" found in and among a statistical cohort of "non-citizens."
But Trump's problem is that he is so careless about all of this stuff and his terminology. Trump was using that Pew study about multiple voter registrations to go off on "voter fraud." The Pew author had to disown Trump's comments, leading to more embarrassing crap in his ABC interview last night. (Trump's nonsensical answer was, "Well then why did he write the report?")
Chuck should remember that Trump won the election with a multiple state margin, unlike Bush in 2000. That was "freakishly narrow".
That's incredibly non-responsive, Chuck. I'm not talking about what Trump said -- I was referencing your quote. You used the phrase "highly unlikely". Please try to respond in good faith.
Those eGOP pussies will be roughly grabbed like they’ve never been grabbed before, THAT I can tell you.
What are you going to do for the next two years?
Of all the offensive parts of Trumpdom, I have to say that I find the Hannity/"cuckservative"/Breitbart crowd to be the most offensive. I hope that you that you feel very nearly as discouraged, infuriated, and defeated in 2018 and 2020, as do the Democrats.
Fabi said...
Chuck should remember that Trump won the election with a multiple state margin, unlike Bush in 2000. That was "freakishly narrow".
Fabi, I was answering the question -- raised in the first instance by Trump himself -- as to whether Trump won a "landslide."
He didn't.
And yes, Bush v. Gore was freakishly narrow. Like a couple of other elections.
@Chuck -- once again, I was replying to your claim that Trump's victory was freakishly close. It wasn't. He had a multiple state margin of victory.
Chuck,
"I suspect that people who are here illegally are a lot less likely to vote than legal residents who work here legally and perhaps even own property here."
True.
I am all of those things, and I am pretty sure I could vote in California if I really wanted to.
I've never tried it, but one day I could go with my wife to our precinct some election day and look for my name; since I have gotten jury duty notices I suspect I am in there.
However, I am also pretty sure that anyone and everyone could vote in many places in CA no matter their status. A lot of that structure in this state simply isn't trustworthy.
Fabi said...
@Chuck -- once again, I was replying to your claim that Trump's victory was freakishly close. It wasn't. He had a multiple state margin of victory.
Multiple states, yes, on an extremely close vote-count. The Trump victory in Michigan was the narrowest win in state history. Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were nearly so.
However, I am also pretty sure that anyone and everyone could vote in many places in CA no matter their status. A lot of that structure in this state simply isn't trustworthy.
You're preachin' to the choir on that one...
If the Times thinks that Trump is "lying" about three or four million illegal votes being cast for Hillary, then surely the Times can tell us how many illegal votes were cast for Hillary. They must know, right?
Help me out here. I'm not looking for an exact number. One million? One hundred thousand? A thousand?
And I want to know how they got their number.
That's not too much to ask, is it?
Thankfully he could have lost both Wisconsin and Michigan and still won the electoral college, Chuck -- which is my very point.
It bears repeating: In any other industry but journalism, catastrophic failure results in a deadly-serious investigation culminating in the firing of everyone responsible. If the New York Times’ journalists and editors were pilots and air-traffic controllers on November 8, virtually every plane in the air that day would have crashed.
Fabi said...
Thankfully he could have lost both Wisconsin and Michigan and still won the electoral college, Chuck -- which is my very point.
And he very nearly did lose both states, and Pennsylvania, and hence the election. But didn't. He won. Narrowly.
Again, because I am getting tired of this gamesmanship, I remind you that the principal point was that Trump claimed a "landslide." And it wasn't a landslide at all. Nothing like it.
Truth vs. Lie.
Truth: Illegal aliens voted in 2016 POTUS election
Truth: We don't know how many
Truth: It could be as many as 3-5 million
Truth: It could be far fewer
Conclusion: Trump did not lie about the 3-5 million, since he not only didn't know its a lie, NO ONE knows its a lie because the actual number is unknown.
Earnest Prole said...
It bears repeating: In any other industry but journalism, catastrophic failure results in a deadly-serious investigation culminating in the firing of everyone responsible. If the New York Times’ journalists and editors were pilots and air-traffic controllers on November 8, virtually every plane in the air that day would have crashed.
Actually, one other "industry" where failure often results in no consequences for the failures is... government. (We might add "tenured faculty and unionized teachers," if they were not already a subset.)
rcocean:
If I stipulate with you that Trump did not lie, would you agree with me that Trump should not have said what he did, particularly in the way that he said it?
buwaya said...
Certainly.
Those links were for local political corruption not evidence for electoral fraud. The pigs at the trough of my local government get convicted with remarkable regularity. Nonetheless, I very much doubt there is significant electoral fraud where I live because there are partisans from both sides who oversee the electoral process. Again, Trump is impugning Republicans just as much as Democrats here.
Chuckie,
You are so obvious and FOS. Its probably time for you to moby another site.
Your extraordinarily rude and vulgar response to my post about vote fraud, gives you away.
There are many other examples that I will leave to others to provide.
Phonies like you disgust me more than lefty loonies.
ARM: "Again, Trump is impugning Republicans just as much as Democrats here."
Yes, I believe he is.
Franscisco D:
Are you talking about the post in which you accused me of breaching my duties as a Republican Party vote challenger in the city of Detroit last election, when in fact I did not work as a poll challenger last year?
Help me out here, because I don't think writing something rude and vulgar to you is good enough. What more can I do to make sure that you don't reply to anything else that I write?
Mainstream journalism has spent at least 20 years moving more and more to "news analysis" and "fact-checking" and such, rather than traditional 5Ws.
And, by the Gallup polls, it's had a steady decrease in trust at the same time.
But, sure, go call Trump a liar in headlines, doubling down is a sure way to change direction.
Chuck said...
rcocean:
If I stipulate with you that Trump did not lie, would you agree with me that Trump should not have said what he did, particularly in the way that he said it?
1/26/17, 6:00 PM
NO, you idiot! Trump is trying to fight and win a media war here. Candyasses like you can't even hold that in their heads let alone do it. Should Lenin have called his faction the Bolsheviks when in fact they were a minority?
Could Trump have fine tuned his remarks? Sure. They could have been written by a committee, with you on it no doubt, and six weeks later been released, straight to the trash.
What you fail to understand is the event of TIME. Also of the fighting spirit.
If you have someone who works faster AND neater than Trump, WTF didn't you run him? Surely he would have won?
Ni shagu nazad!
Chuck:
What more can I do to make sure that you don't reply to anything else that I write?
So glad you asked. STOP WRITING!
You accusing someone else of "gamesmanship" shatters the bounds of irony, Chuck! My sincere thanks for your "chuckles" inducing retort.
Francisco D said...
Phonies like you disgust me more than lefty loonies.
Praise the Lord for Chuck. Without him moderates, such as myself, would be the first to be led to the guillotine.
Bob Dylan didn't need a hyphen. Just sayin.'
Chuck: "Franscisco D: Are you talking about the post in which you accused me of breaching my duties as a Republican Party vote challenger in the city of Detroit last election, when in fact I did not work as a poll challenger last year?"
The list of things Chuck did NOT do to contribute to this victory is endless.
The list of things Chuck did do to sow dissension amongst republicans and attempt to demoralize republican voters is endless.
ARM: "Without him moderates, such as myself, would be the first to be led to the guillotine"
LOL
"Great Moderates Through History".
Available nowhere, for obvious reasons.
Drago said...
"Great Moderates Through History".
Available nowhere, for obvious reasons.
Moderation is a shamefully overlooked virtue.
Disproven:
Trump will never run.
Trump will never make it to the first primary.
Trump will never win a primary.
Trump will never get a majority of primary delegates.
Trump will never win 270 electoral votes.
Trump will never actually try and build his wall.
------
In Work:
Trump will never build the wall.
Trump will never get Mexico to pay for it.
Trump will never....(insert all other assertions here)
ARM: "Moderation is a shamefully overlooked virtue."
Primarily by Moderates. You just can't count on them for anything, can you?
I would strongly recommend pursuing moderation with great moderation as moderation is certainly not the way to go if want to sway others.
"Yesterday Carol Costello on CNN"
She and Ashleigh Banfield are fucking Dumb and Dumber. The worst.
NYT reporters/editors just HAVE to insert that something they are reporting Trump said is a LIE...why? Because they believe their readers are so STUPID that if they don't instruct the readers that what Trump has just asserted is a lie, the readers, horror of horrors, might believe it!! They could say Trump claimed this or asserted that, but apparently the readers of the NYT are such dummkopfs that they might treat Trump's words as facts, and the Times would be complicit in having Trump's "lies" spread all over the nation.
I for one am glad to hear that the Democrats are no longer the opposition party. They have nothing left in the tank. All DJT will have to do is beat is the hires of the Globalist PR Networks owned by the Globalist Mega Billionaires like Soros and the San Jose guys. And their hearts are really not in it.
I was too young to appreciate the media fatwah against Nixon. The Vietnam War was the driving force of the animosity. College kids didn't want to get drafted, go to Vietnam and get shot. (Somewhat understandable).
But, Nixon diffused the situation by abolishing the Draft. And, of course, Nixon won a massive 49-state landslide in Nov 1972. But, he couldn't translate that into winning the House.
We don't have a Vietnam War today, and we don't have a Dem majority in the House, but we do have the same level of animosity against Trump, perhaps more. Trump, though, to his credit fights back.
The question though, is whether Trump can stave off Dem/media assaults in the midterms of 2018. If the Dems ever win back Congress during his tenure, they will be pushing hard to find grounds to impeach him. No doubt about it.
Trump and his supporters must be vigilant at the long game.
If the Dems win the House in 2018
"If I stipulate with you that Trump did not lie, would you agree with me that Trump should not have said what he did, particularly in the way that he said it?"
How was Trump supposed to phrase it? He *believes* large numbers of illegals voted against him AND if he'd campaigned differently he would have picked up more votes and would have beaten Hillary in the popular vote.
Right now, we can't say his opinion is valid or invalid. We need more facts.
"Existing law makes it a crime for a person to willfully cause, procure, or allow himself or herself or any other person to be registered as a voter, knowing that he or she or that other person is not entitled to registration. Existing law also makes it a crime to fraudulently vote or attempt to vote."
"This bill would provide that if a person who is ineligible to vote becomes registered to vote by operation of the California New Motor Voter Program in the absence of a violation by that person of the crime described above, that person’s registration shall be presumed to have been effected with official authorization and not the fault of that person. The bill would also provide that if a person who is ineligible to vote becomes registered to vote by operation of this program, and that person votes or attempts to vote in an election held after the effective date of the person’s registration, that person shall be presumed to have acted with official authorization and is not guilty of fraudulently voting or attempting to vote, unless that person willfully votes or attempts to vote knowing that he or she is not entitled to vote."
This is an excerpt from the California Voter Registration Bill: AB-1461 Voter registration: California New Motor Voter Program
I was read a couple of news stories from the time of passage of this bill (October 2015) that indicates the bill had enough safeguards to prevent illegals citizens to vote and that they wouldn't automatically be registered, even though it appears that is the bills intent.
Anyway my casual reading of this section leads me to believe that a person who ends up registered as a result of this law and votes would not be considered to have broken the law unless they know they are breaking the law by voting. So wouldn't a person be absolved by just saying they didn't know they were breaking the law?
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB1461
Without him moderates, such as myself, would be the first to be led to the guillotine.
Since you consistently align your opinions more to the Left than to the Right, I feel obliged to inform you that Moderates on the Left are increasing scarce, endangered as it were. And since you chose the guillotine image need I remind you that the Comité de salut public was a creature of the left-side of the National Assembly, not the right?
Let them impeach.
Bubba didn't leave, so the bar is lowered.
ARM
"The argument that there was systematic fraud in large Democratic states is nutty. Why would anyone make such an effort when the outcome was already a certainty? If there was going to be any fraud it would have been in Republican controlled swing states, where it could have made a difference. Trump and Bannon are effectively impuning Republican governors with this nonsense."
Unpersuasive, ARM
I'm from Chicago. The fix is always in. Vote fraud is what big city machine Dems have done for my entire lifetime and that of my parents. Why would anyone call off business as usual dead voter fraud because they think they've got it in the tank? That's a lot of work, and cleaning up voter rolls risks exposure because it's not business as usual.
I'm sure the GOP would do it too, except they haven't controlled the big cities for half a century. And big cities (to paraphrase Willie Sutton) are where the majority of the votes are.
Another reason to be grateful for the Electoral College.
Althouse said "I write about what I'm interested in. You can skip reading whatever you find boring the way I skip writing what I find boring."
Huzzah!!!
The man is an obsessive loon. He ordered the Parks Service Director to produce photos that show more people than Obama's inauguration. Thank you to the Press for letting us know how crazy this man is.
"Trump pressured Park Service to find proof for his claims about inauguration crowd."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-pressured-park-service-to-back-up-his-claims-about-inauguration-crowd/2017/01/26/12a38cb8-e3fc-11e6-ba11-63c4b4fb5a63_story.html?utm_term=.c20ed8b66256
Trump says "Look, a squirrel!" and the media hacks and dolts like Theresa go running after it. It's hilarious that you don't see how you're being played.
Look at everything Trump has done since Monday, from Keystone to illegal immigration, and Theresa still blabbering about the crowd size at the Inauguration.
Trump is indeed fortunate in his enemies.
If the Democrats were wise (an oxymoron, I know), they'd be far more focused on the fact that those union leaders came out of their meeting with Trump singing his praises. That's serious trouble for the Dems. But no, don't look at that - continue to obsess about exactly what Trump wants you to obsess about.
Lord what fools these leftists be!
rcocean said...
"If I stipulate with you that Trump did not lie, would you agree with me that Trump should not have said what he did, particularly in the way that he said it?"
How was Trump supposed to phrase it? He *believes* large numbers of illegals voted against him AND if he'd campaigned differently he would have picked up more votes and would have beaten Hillary in the popular vote.
A lot more carefully, is what I'd tell him.
First, I'd say to him, "I know you don't read much, but you need to read this monograph by Hans von Spakovsky on the topic. He'd be a good Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for this investigation, too."
After he read it, then I'd say, "Now do you get it? There's no proof to support any of your claims about 'illegal aliens' doing the voting in those numbers. Our very best case, would be with all 'noncitizen' voters. And there is no evidence to support a claim for large numbers of votes cast in the names of dead people, or other in-person voter fraud. We've got some good people to help us on the issue of what sorts of evidence we might be able to explore, in order to help us with particular issues that could be the subject of future election reform efforts that we have been working on around the country."
Then I would say to Trump, "See, Mr. President, it really is not about whether or not you could have won the popular vote. That doesn't matter. And it doesn't matter what the New York Times or what CNN say about it. The important thing is to expand effective voter i.d., and clamp down on early voting, and lax registrations, and felon voting, and that entire line of election law reform. It's not about you."
I'd finish by saying, "You will not make the legislative cause any easier, by citing studies falsely, or botching the relevant terminology, or just not understanding what we are trying to do. So let me know, when you want to work harder and more seriously on this issue. And, if you want to just keep fighting with the press, don't bother calling."
Drago said...
Disproven:
Trump will never
Bonus question: were those lies?
and I always thought boring was what you considered the biggest sin.
You don't get this number of comments on a boring post.
What part of "Trump controls the conversation" do some of you not understand? The narratives the MSM would be crafting are gone. They do not exist.
PURPLE ELEPHANTS should never be discussed.
But Trump conjures them for the MSM, tells them not to think of them and nothing else matters. Chuckish status quo lifelong Republicans and Leftist Collectivists hardest hit.
I thank Gaia that Trump will never ask for Chuck's advice about anything. Especially Purple Elephants!
Obama said "I won."
Trump says "We won."
Who's the narcissist again?
I turned to MSNBC tonight when Bill O'Reilly got to be unlistenable, and Chris Hayes was taking down the Trump claim about people registered to vote in two or more states.
What Trump had said in his ABC interview that aired last night was this:
PRESIDENT TRUMP: In fact, I heard one of the other side, they were saying it's not 3 to 5. It's not 3 to 5. I said, "Well, Mr. Trump is talking about registration, tell--" He said, "You know we don't wanna talk about registration." They don't wanna talk about registration.
You have people that are registered who are dead, who are illegals, who are in two states. You have people registered in two states. They're registered in a New York and a New Jersey. They vote twice. There are millions of votes, in my opinion. Now ...
Chris Hayes calmly reported that Tiffany Trump, Steve Bannon and Sean Spicer were among the people who were registered to vote in multiple states, last year. (Repeating multiple reports from earlier in the day.)
Fabi:
That must be a lie. After all nobody knows what Trump will do. And if nobody knows, Trump told a lie.
I think that is the standard.
"Chris Hayes calmly reported that Tiffany Trump, Steve Bannon and Sean Spicer were among the people who were registered to vote in multiple states, last year. (Repeating multiple reports from earlier in the day.)"
And? that proves Trump wrong how?
chckelit:
You have got to be kidding me. I'm no fan of Obama, but he built a campaign on the theme of "Yes we can." I think it was bullshit, to be sure. I never voted for him, and I never considered voting for him.
But Trump said this, in his RNC speech accepting the party's nomination:
I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against Bernie Sanders – he never had a chance.
I'd be very hard pressed to recall another presidential statement ringing of such egomaniacal self-aggrandizement.
Trump - people are registered in more than one state.
MSM - Look, Look, people - X,Y,Z -are registered in more than one state.
Liberals - Boy, they sure proved Trump wrong!
rcocean said...
"Chris Hayes calmly reported that Tiffany Trump, Steve Bannon and Sean Spicer were among the people who were registered to vote in multiple states, last year. (Repeating multiple reports from earlier in the day.)"
And? that proves Trump wrong how?
Because Trump lumped together illegal aliens, dead people and people registered in more than one state as part of a larger problem of voter fraud.
Chuck:
Did Chris Hayes specifically mention PURPLE ELEPHANTS? Or did he just talk around the subject Trump told him not to discuss?
Also, as one of the four viewers of that show, I expect you to report your lifelong Republican viewership to Nielsen. You represent an important demographic: self-important jerks who have nothing valuable to add to the conversation.
rcocean said...
Trump - people are registered in more than one state.
MSM - Look, Look, people - X,Y,Z -are registered in more than one state.
Liberals - Boy, they sure proved Trump wrong!
Actually, Chris Hays didn't say that. He meant it, to be sure. I think he expected it to be sort of humiliating, not to the three people named, but rather to Trump, who wanted, in that ABC interview to link multiple registrations to a significant problem of vote fraud.
Hayes, as I said, simply reported the facts. With a tremendous shit-eating grin.
johns: You have that exactly right. The Times could just as easily quote a Democratic politician calling Trump's statement a lie, and it would be straight, objective reporting. Instead the Times now believes it adds value by stepping forcefully into the story and attempting to speak the opposition's lines louder and better than the opposition. It’s not just bad journalism; it’s bad business.
You are correct, Birkel! My error makes me feel as ashamed as a "real Republican" watching MSNBC.
Chuck: "Because Trump lumped together illegal aliens, dead people and people registered in more than one state as part of a larger problem of voter fraud"
Which makes perfect sense.
What are all the prerequisite "failure" conditions and how often (by location by election) was each failure condition the cause for a voting irregularity?
If Chuck had any background whatsoever in business operations improvements then what I just wrote would be as familiar to him as his nose.
But Chuck understands none of that so he immediately presumes Trump is an idiot (unexpectedly!).
Lol
This just gets better and better.
Conclusion: Trump did not lie about the 3-5 million, since he not only didn't know its a lie, NO ONE knows its a lie because the actual number is unknown.
The actual number is deliberately unknown, which is what makes me think it's quite a bit higher than most people believe.
Chuckie,
It's not worth the energy to debate you because reading comprehension is not your strength and you are an obvious liar.
Ann said "I'm just a humble blogger and I'm doing free-wheeling commentary and horsing around and I still always follow a rule against making an assertion of fact about something I don't know."
Reminds me of an old P.J. O'Rourke quote I saw pasted on a professor's office door at UCSF long ago: "I'm not a liberal, so I'm not an expert about things I know nothing about."
The NYT and the MSM would do well to learn the difference between actual facts, opinion, and conventional wisdom. And more importantly, to always base your conclusions and recommendations on the former.
ARM
"If there was going to be any fraud it would have been in Republican controlled swing states, where it could have made a difference."
The fraud was in the big cities which have been controlled by Democrats for the last thirty or forty years. Jill Stein conclusively proved the presence of fraud in half the precincts in Detroit. So if we assume fraud in half the precincts in major Democrat controlled cities - Washington DC, Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, NYC, Broward County, Chicago, LA, Seattle - then there would be illegal voting of one kind or another on such a scale that Hillary's popular vote lead would be wiped out.
Before Jill Stein's recount it was said that there was no evidence of major fraud. Now there is such evidence. Certainly, there should be an investigation. And there is every reason for Trump to think that the Dems are covering up major fraud in the cities the Dems run and that the cover up is being assisted by the main stream media who are in the tank for the Dems. So there is no reason to say Trump is lying - except that the MSM wishes to discredit Trump before he shows exactly how elections are being rigged in the different cities.
Why are big cities run by Democrats the last to turn in vote totals? Honestly - we all know why. Except Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm and she doesn't comment here.
Trumpit: "My educated opinion ..."
Lol
ARM,
Im just pointing out that there are high stakes in local elections, even down to school boards, plenty opportunity to gain from holding office, therefore plenty to be gained or preserved (for the local political machine) through election fraud, even if the result of the national elections are a given.
Note also that those Los Angeles scandals date to when CA last had a Republican executive, and, IMHO, Sacramento still had an incentive to keep the corruption under some control. Goodness knows what anyone is up to these days.
https://structurecms-staging-psyclone.netdna-ssl.com/client_assets/jwemail/media/attachments/57d0/5b17/6970/2d5f/6a4b/0f00/57d05b1769702d5f6a4b0f00.pdf?1473272599
Sounds about right
Sounds about right
I'd be very hard pressed to recall another presidential statement ringing of such egomaniacal self-aggrandizement.
"I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director."
[on the eve of the 2010 midterms]: "Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me."
Plenty more in that vein here.
Sounds about right
The only addition to bannon's statement, would be opening their mouth, they remove all doubt, so Jake tapper pipes up.
Francisco D said...
Chuckie,
It's not worth the energy to debate you because reading comprehension is not your strength and you are an obvious liar.
1/26/17, 8:58 PM
It's true damn it! He really doesn't seem to understand what other people say. He certainly doesn't deal with it.
The very definition of a lie includes the intent to deceive, and I do think this is the case as the Trump administration is working towards a way to discredit the news. I get that we have all said something in true belief and found ourselves wrong at some point. This is nothing new. That is not a lie. What is new is that Trump says something that is clearly wrong, false, and when the media disputes it he accuses them of “making him look bad”. I’m sorry folks you have got to wake up to this reality. He is just messing with your head.
There is a planned and coordinated Democrat psycho-linguistic assault going on here. Bush 43 was tarnished with the label of liar. It worked. It also worked to inoculate Obama from the label of "Liar". Clearly they hope to tarnish President Trump with the same smear. The current President appears to be better prepared to deal with this assault. You are going to have to step up your game Democrat dirty tricksters.
But FF and Sunschlong and the Press always lie. From Forbes:
Analysts also look at “spin-off” jobs, which are jobs that are created in related industries as a result of the new pipeline. These include sectors like refining, manufacturing, petroleum transportation and petroleum-dependent manufacturing. These jobs rely on too many variables to accurately predict and even measure after the fact. In 2010, TransCanada, the company behind Keystone XL, commissioned the Perryman Group to examine the long-term economic impact of the pipeline. Their study predicted that anywhere from 250,348 to 553,235 spin-off jobs would be created.
That looks like way more than 28,000 jobs to me. Even if they are off by a large percentage. This is why people hate the media. Instead of disputing his number by citing authoritative sources, or putting it into context as construction jobs or maintenance jobs, Trumps opponents (the media) lie and make extreme statements like "less than 40 full time jobs man." Assholes.
Chuck would you accept "political earthquake" in lieu of "a landslide"?
Same old shit.
Karina: Bannon, the guy who wrote Trump's inauguration speech. Trump is being manipulated by Bannon and others.
Right. Nancy was the brains behind Reagan. Bush was nothing with out Darth Cheney. Funny how it's only presidents with an R after their name that get this stupid treatment. You just can't admit you were beat by an orange buffoon who continues to run circles around the "great democrat minds" of our time and make the media toadies dance like monkeys every time he tweets. It's awesome.
Now Valerie Jarret, she might have been a puppetmaster...
Anyway my casual reading of this section leads me to believe that a person who ends up registered as a result of this law and votes would not be considered to have broken the law unless they know they are breaking the law by voting. So wouldn't a person be absolved by just saying they didn't know they were breaking the law?
Wouldn't the fact that they voted at all be proof that they knew they were breaking the law? In other words, why would they even attempt to vote if they knew they weren't eligible? In my view, that statute constitutes a subtle nudge to go ahead and vote because the state won't hold you accountable (wink, wink).
go ahead and vote because the state won't hold you accountable (wink, wink)
That's exactly what is happening in California. It's not subtle. It's not hidden. But all the Chucks and Freders pooh pooh it because they aren't here to see it. California opened seven new DMV office just to handle illegal alien driver license processing last year. In many cities the waiting list was already months long, but they bend over backward to "assist" the illegal immigrants and encourage them to vote. Driving up I-99 in the Central Valley there were Spanish language signs encouraging everyone to vote, the Spanish radio stations encourage everyone to vote. When they say "everyone" they mean legal AND illegal. It's fine for Jake Tapper to claim that illegal voting is a "fiction" because he's encased in a progressive bubble at CNN and doesn't have to deal with a state turning into a third world country around him.
But I'm patient. I have faith the new non-politicized DOJ will find the criminals and put them away. If thy don't, I'm right behind Michael K and the others fleeing the former paradise.
And every Spanish speaking student in California is told to make sure their parents vote for Democrats or "they will be deported the day after the election." This technique works really well. They also have the advantage of using state resources to transmit, reproduce and distribute "voting guides" in Spanish (always straight D tickets too, of course) that are handed to each Spanish-speaking student, along with that ominous warning. It's all illegal as hell and it goes on in every city every cycle. There's not enough coastal libs to get 3 million vote margins. They HAVE to have illegals voting or this state reverts to norm (see pre-1992 California).
ARM,
"The argument that there was systematic fraud in large Democratic states is nutty. Why would anyone make such an effort when the outcome was already a certainty?"
Probably because they've been doing it for so long that it's now just part of the background.
CHuck,
"which is why I alone can fix it"
It's pretty obvious that no one on either side of the aisle will address the issue seriously, which is why that is an accurate statement by Trump.
AReasonableMan said...
I read the WSJ everyday almost without fail. The WSJ is part of the MSM. Bannon is talking out his ass.
1/26/17, 4:33 PM
Here are 2 different WSJ covers from the same day, but to different political areas...they are just as bad....
https://www.facebook.com/BeingLiberalMeansBeingAHypocrite2/photos/a.517012145031998.1073741826.517008448365701/1293611660705372/?type=3&theater
Actually I did feel the same way about Obama's lies. Even railed about them here on this very blog.
I was here for pretty much the entire Obama admin.
I know I do not remember you, one time, criticizing him for lying. Can you point to a single example?
Are you serious? You, and a good chunk of your commenters, don't want the facts.
Let's go back to something innocuous --- Hillary's health issue on 9/11. Media refused to even say she left early until her campaign put out the statement. They then dutifully repeated every excuse she offered as the gospel truth and never asked about why this excuse is different.
Trump consistently makes up facts (if that is better than saying he lies). Yesterday, he claimed that Keystone XL would create 28,000 "great construction jobs". This number is pure fantasy. He can't even get his story straight on who cancelled the visit by the Mexican president.
And that Keystone will create numerous construction jobs and other long-term jobs is not news.
It's on, in Michigan. We have a mildly-competent good-soldier Republican Secretary of State, Ruth Johnson. She is distancing herself, if not denouncing, Trump's claim of vast "voter fraud."
Chuck, slightly more than 1/3 of Wayne County voting machines produced vote totals that exceeded the actual number of votes cast.
One third.
And we know WHO those votes went for. If MI did a full recount, they couldn't have recounted the Detroit area because of these significant "irregularities".
Professor Althouse is being cute here claiming a moral high ground. She holds the media and left-wing politicians to a much higher bar than she holds the right.
The MEDIA claims it is impartial. Left-wing pols claim to support beliefs they do not. If a conservative gets pilloried for attempting to troll for anonymous gay sex in bathrooms or what have you because they were behaving in ways in opposition to their stated beliefs...why should others not be held to that standard?
Obama promised to have the most transparent admin ever --- and then basically ignored FOIA requests and refused to punish departments that openly ignored subpoenas. The press seemed OK with this.
And Trump's particular path to his electoral college win was almost freakishly narrow, with close wins in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The clearly best and fairest way to characterize Trump's win is that it was a "very close" win. And not a "landslide."
There were several close states that Hillary won. It was also close to an absolute shellacking of Clinton.
For instance, almost everyone regards an incorrect statement as a lie even if the utterer only has a belief, perhaps unjustified, that it was false.
If I were to guess Malia Obama's middle name and be wrong, it would not be a lie since I do not know it and wouldn't know if my answer is false or not. It'd be a false response.
You can't LIE if you are unaware the answer you provide is wrong. Intent is a key component.
How many reporters and analysts said Trump would never be President for the last year or so? Quite a few. I do not feel they were LYING. They were in error. That is all.
Chris Hayes calmly reported that Tiffany Trump, Steve Bannon and Sean Spicer were among the people who were registered to vote in multiple states, last year. (Repeating multiple reports from earlier in the day.)
They shouldn't be either.
But states refuse to pare down their voter rolls.
A few examples of those who do not violate the law does not mean nobody violates the law. Hell, Project Veritas has video of Democrats ADMITTING to committing voter fraud.
Because Trump lumped together illegal aliens, dead people and people registered in more than one state as part of a larger problem of voter fraud.
How are they NOT a problem? I'm not getting this bit of your argument.
This excerpt from the Tom Fitton (president of Judicial Watch founded by the great Mark Levin) book CLEAN HOUSE reminded me of this weird incedent, which may not be fraud. But might be. Certainly the DNC-media complex had no interest in exploring the issue, as usual when progs are involved:
Such as Hillary Clinton winning coin tosses in six different precincts in Iowa in the hotly contested 2016 Democratic caucus where the votes for Bernie Sanders and Clinton were otherwise
tied. The odds against winning six out of six coin flips are 64 to 1, or 1.56 percent.
Such a weird primary I had forgotten about this "amazing fact."
Just so we are clear about Chuck's argument above, he is saying the election was not a landslide if we look at individual vote counts by state. But that is not the way the elections of a president is measured. The president is elected by the Electoral College.
It is Democrats -- and now Chuck -- who want to look at vote counts when those vote counts are not important to the Electoral College outcome.
This just in: Chuck and Democrats use the same arguments. Film at 11.
And then tapper goes on and makes a smart ass comment without "listening" to the rest of bannons quote. Let me help bannon, stfu.
AReasonableMan said...
The argument that there was systematic fraud in large Democratic states is nutty. Why would anyone make such an effort when the outcome was already a certainty?
1. Local races matter. In some districts in some states, the local race may come down to 2 Democrats, as some areas have primaries that allow the 2 candidates with the most primary votes to contend in the general election, even if they are both from the same party. This is a situation which encourages vote fraud, as the candidate who can create the most votes has a leg up. If these make believe or illegal voters also vote for president, all the better.
2. Illegal aliens, felons denied the right to vote, or residents of a different jurisdiction may choose to vote without any effort on the part of a political party to encourage it, but certainly the action of one party in discouraging any effort to control or eliminate such illegal voting acts to aid, abet and even encourage such votes.
3. Even if the outcome in a certain state is guaranteed, the addition of illegal votes can help one party to claim they won the popular vote and attempt to delegitimize the result of an election.
Birkel said...
Just so we are clear about Chuck's argument above, he is saying the election was not a landslide if we look at individual vote counts by state. But that is not the way the elections of a president is measured. The president is elected by the Electoral College.
It is Democrats -- and now Chuck -- who want to look at vote counts when those vote counts are not important to the Electoral College outcome.
This just in: Chuck and Democrats use the same arguments. Film at 11.
Just so we are clear about what a dumb fuck you are, if we forget about the closeness of vote totals (and the hilarious fact that Trump claimed a "landslide" when he won neither a simple majority or even a plurality of all of the votes counted), and if we focus ONLY, as you suggest, on the electoral college numbers, the Trump 2016 victory ranks 46th on the list of presidential electoral college victory margins.
And now, because Birkel is so stupid and so offensive, let's say it again in even more simple terms; Trump didn't win any electoral college "landslide." His win of 306 electoral votes to 262 electoral votes was pretty close, by electoral college standards.
The only way that Trump gets away with saying that he won a "landslide," is if we regard all but a handful of presidential elections as "landslides."
Now everybody remember; I didn't start this. Trump started it. He could easily sit back and say, "I won, and there is no doubt about it, and elections have consequences." Naturally, since everything Trump mentions is discussed in hyperbolic terms, he had to say that he won a "landslide," when in fact he didn't.
Rinse, and repeat.
damikesc said...
It's on, in Michigan. We have a mildly-competent good-soldier Republican Secretary of State, Ruth Johnson. She is distancing herself, if not denouncing, Trump's claim of vast "voter fraud."
Chuck, slightly more than 1/3 of Wayne County voting machines produced vote totals that exceeded the actual number of votes cast.
One third.
And we know WHO those votes went for. If MI did a full recount, they couldn't have recounted the Detroit area because of these significant "irregularities".
That's badly misleading. The Michigan recount found that in a considerable number of precincts, the total number of counts in the optical scanners exceeded the number of voters registered as having presented and applied for ballots on election day. The numbers were trivial, but the discrepancies became significant as a news story because those precincts could not be recounted under Michigan law and the original vote counts would stand instead.
There is flatly no reason to presume that there were extra or illegal "votes" as you suggested. There are many obvious and merely sloppy (as opposed to fraudulent) reasons that the two tallies would not match, most of them having to do with the setup and testing of the scanners, jammed ballots, etc. And by no serious account, was there a suspicion of any conspiracy to stuff ballot boxes with extra votes.
In Detroit, 158 of the 392 precincts with ballot discrepancies had just one extra ballot accounted for either in the poll book or in the ballot box, according to the Wayne County’s canvassing report.
For suburban Wayne County, 72 percent of the 218 precincts boxes with discrepancies in the number of ballots were off by one ballot.
The other ballot discrepancies in Detroit and Wayne County precincts ranged between two and five ballots, according to the report.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2016/12/05/recount-unrecountable/95007392/
They fact is that his election was on fact hyperbolic, don't you think? If landslide was not Le Mot Juste, I think it could reasonably be described as a seismic event. After all as HRC said "why aren't I up by 50 points?" If it wasn't the correct expression, perhaps there is no correct expression because there's never been an election like this before. In terms of exceeding expectations it was a huge landslide.
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