Here's the link if you want to try to use it. I found a way last night, but it's not working for me now. I was going to quote the part about Donald Trump supposedly drawing the figure of a woman with 2 big curves for breasts and the scribbled signature "Donald" as the pubic hair.
Is that in the article or just the detritus of a bad dream? I don't know. There's that paywall. If you want to take down Trump — save the world from the marker-wielding fiend — you've got to show what you've got to everyone, not exploit the occasion for subscriptions.
And if I remember correctly from last night — or was it a dream? — you didn't even show us the drawing. I want to see this famous historical drawing that brought down a President. Has there ever been a drawing like this?
Here's what I prompted Grok: "Imagine a contest where you have to do a drawing that is supposedly by another American President that would reveal something this bad about him. What would be some entries in the contest? That is, what would it have been possible but terrible for Abe Lincoln to have sketched, etc." I'm sure you could think of funnier ideas that Grok described.
But let's see if I can get Grok to draw that picture Trump supposedly drew but the WSJ did publish (perhaps out of fear of getting "Rathergated"). Oh, no: "Unfortunately I can't generate that kind of image."
ADDED: If you were trying to play up to someone you knew was a pedophile, why would you emphasize a woman's pubic hair? It seems more like a way to call out and needle a pedophile. Try that interpretation, Trumpsters, if the letter turns out to be real.
"... long before law enforcement or the future president discovered Epstein pimped minors. How do I know the letter is false? Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ told me so. You see, it ran a 13,000-word expose on Epstein on December 17, 2023. The piece did not mention Trump. Not once. If the publication had the goods on Trump, it would have exposed him ahead of the 2024 presidential primary season. If the deep state had the goods on Trump, the end of him would have come years ago...."
Says Tim Dillon near the end of this week's podcast, reacting to Biden's putting on a Trump hat he gets from some old guy at a rally and telling the guy not to eat dogs and cats:
And watch beginning at 24:10 for Tim's critique of the Wall Street Journal piece reassuring readers about the viral video of armed migrants in the corridor of an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado: "This is the Wall Street Journal writing an article telling people to relax, going, hey, why don't you
fucking relax, you racist, because what you thought was a full takeover of a building was not — it was just 10 violent Venezuelan prison gang members carrying out a routine operation or something they felt needed to be done.... Thank you, Wall Street Journal.... There are guys in the in the corridor with guns, and they're killing someone, but it's okay. They didn't take over the whole building.... Can you imagine writing this article thinking it lands?...."
"They also make it more likely that the election will be a referendum on Mr. Trump, rather than on Mr. Biden’s economy and agenda or a GOP alternative. This may be exactly what Democrats intend with their charges.
Republicans deserve a more competent champion with better character than Mr. Trump. But the indictment might make GOP voters less inclined to provide a democratic verdict on his fitness for a second term. Although the political impact is uncertain, Republicans who are tired of Mr. Trump might rally to his side because they see the prosecution as another unfair Democratic plot to derail him. And what about the precedent? If Republicans win next year’s election, and especially if Mr. Trump does, his supporters will demand that the Biden family be next. Even if Mr. Biden is re-elected, political memories are long.
It was once unthinkable in America that the government’s awesome power of prosecution would be turned on a political opponent. That seal has now been broken."
"... where the Trump campaign had to go to court so its poll-watchers could observe vote counting. Incredibly, Democratic lawyers opposed that Trump request. This is exactly the wrong way for Democrats to behave, feeding GOP suspicions.... The Democratic Pennsylvania Supreme Court also contributed to the mistrust by rewriting state election law to let mailed ballots be counted until Nov. 6. We warned multiple times that this mess could happen, and the U.S. Supreme Court could have helped by intervening. Chief Justice John Roberts refused.
But it’s also important to note that Pat Toomey, the GOP Senator from the Keystone State, says he has seen no evidence of fraud in his state’s counting. We’ve also seen no concrete evidence. The delivery of a batch of votes all for Mr. Biden at one time can be explained by the practice of some jurisdictions to divide and report the votes of each candidate at different times.... Mr. Trump hates to lose, and no doubt he will fight to the end. But if defeat comes, he will serve himself and his country best by honoring America’s democratic traditions and leaving office with dignity."
From "The Presidential Endgame" by the editors of The Wall Street Journal (no pay wall). They want a gracious concession — after the counting and litigation — but they never mention how ungracious the Democrats were when Trump won in 2016. Did they ever concede that Trump won and stand back and acknowledge that he legitimately held the power of the presidency?
We've been gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed (and someone leaked) a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages.
There's not link to the letter, so we have to infer what it says (or go looking for it, which I will do in a minute).
But the support has often been mixed with concern that perhaps the letter will cause us to change our principles and content. On that point, reassurance is in order.
In the spirit of collegiality, we won't respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren't our responsibility in any case.
Good! Nice professional distancing.
The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.
That's how it should work.
It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution.
So the letter is an exemplar of "progressive cancel culture" — signed by people who work at The Wall Street Journal but don't understand or don't wish to follow its professionalism.
But we are not the New York Times.
Oh! A short hard punch at The New York Times.
Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today's media.
The NYT was singled out, but the rest of new media were attacked with even less respect, namelessly.
As long as our proprietors allow us the privilege to do so, the opinion pages will continue to publish contributors who speak their minds within the tradition of vigorous, reasoned discourse. And these columns will continue to promote the principles of free people and free markets, which are more important than ever in what is a culture of growing progressive conformity and intolerance.
Nice!
I found the text of the letter easily:
This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that nearly 300 WSJ staffers signed a letter to the publisher pointing out flaws and errors in Opinion articles and asking for changes. https://t.co/TFOX3KdzOR
Various Journal staffers I spoke with all made a point of noting that the latest letter to management is different than what’s been going on at the New York Times, where a series of convulsions involving its Opinion pages—culminating in a problematic Tom Cotton op-ed that advocated for sending in federal troops to contain protests—recently led to the ouster of editorial page editor James Bennet. “My takeaway,” one of them said, “is that I’m really happy and impressed our staff has remained so sane compared to the rest of media right now. I was worried a letter on the Opinion stuff would turn into something like the New York Times, where anyone with a conservative thought is awful and should be silenced. But the letter made clear how we respect diversity of views and don’t want to tell Opinion how to run their shop.”
Another journalist at the paper said, “It definitely feels like there’s sort of a moment right now where management is a little more open to hearing concerns. There’s more of a window to make asks for things.” And as a third pointed out, “I suspect this is not the end.”
"New York has twice the density of London but three times the deaths, and the differential is even higher [comparing NYC to] cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. Deaths have occurred disproportionately in poorer areas, where the incidence of long untreated morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes have contributed significantly. But the same is true in all other cities. The high dependence on mass transit also seems to be a factor. In other major cities, car commutes are much more common. As Joel Kotkin, a scholar of cities at Chapman University in California, says, it may be the lethal convergence of all three factors. 'If you put together density, levels of poverty and reliance on a mass-transit system, you have a hat trick,' he told me.… But even that may not explain the extent of New York’s unique catastrophe. Around the world, the highest death rates have occurred where hospital systems were overwhelmed in the early stages of the crisis. This is especially true in northern Italy. Anecdotally, at least, it seems that the same happened in New York: Large numbers of sick people never got to hospitals, arrived too late or, in the impossible circumstances that medical personnel were confronted with, were given ineffective treatment.… It will be a while before we get a proper understanding of what went so tragically wrong...."
"Density alone doesn’t seem to account for the scale of the differential between New York’s fatality rates and those of other cities. New York has twice the density of London but three times the deaths, and the differential is even higher for cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles."
Doesn't that assume there's a linear relationship between density and infection rates, and isn't that not necessarily the case?
My question is about the comparison of New York to northern Italy, where hospitals were overrun. Were NY hospitals overrun? I thought they weren't. I think the 3 factors named — density, reliance on mass-transit, and the bad health conditions represented by the term "poverty" — are enough to explain what happened. These things are interactive. Shouldn't we talk about Bayes theorem?
But they've still got their paywall up. Even with a link at the top of Drudge this morning. How many of these belligerent "young people" have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal? Maybe the article is written for the old, stirring us up to fret that the young people are hating us and ready to kill us off en masse (by letting us die).
Do we need the young people to be alarmed? No. Stay calm. We just need everybody to understand the facts enough to follow the rules. You can enjoy your life, young people. You don't have to angst about it and plunge your mind into thoughts of disease and death.
I think the mainstream media may be getting this very wrong, expecting young people not only to do the required social distancing but to keep watching the news about the disease. That's the business of the media, but people do not need to consume the product. And if they try to spice it up — generational war!!! — so you'll obsessively consume it, shame on them.
We all should turn it off! Read enough to stay informed and then use your time in seclusion to do things that are good and enriching for you and for the people you are confined with. You don't have to be gloomy or alarmed because this is serious and there's something we've got to do together. I encourage you to find the good, not to find a war.
We're only at war against a disease — a mindless phenomenon — not against our fellow human beings.
... gets published in the Wall Street Journal. But actually I like it. It's much better than in the old days when MSM would see something I blogged and telephone me and invite me to redo it as an op-ed and I'd be ambitious enough to want to do it and then stuck with the conventions of op-editedness.
Here's the post I wrote yesterday. This got published at The Wall Street Journal (here, behind a pay wall and with some elisions, which I'll put in red):
We decided we could do more to foster elevated discourse and to welcome broader parts of our audience to join in conversations around our articles....
We know there will inevitably be a small group of people who may not like the changes, but there is a far larger group that would like to contribute to audience conversations, if the postings became more thoughtful....
Heavy commenters are often not reading much of the articles they comment on. They go to the headline, sometimes scan a small part of the story, and skip right on down to the comment box....
[W]e have concluded that overly focusing on the small subset of users who comment frequently and want no one intervening at all in their comments is costing us the opportunity of engaging with our much larger, growing, and diversifying audience.
Indeed, when we looked at the demographics of our heavy commenters, we found they don’t represent the Journal as a whole. That led us to focus on the people who are not commenting as much. Women and younger people have been less represented among our commenters than they are among our subscribers, so we took a look at what was keeping them away. What we heard was they want to feel safe from bullying and share their comments in a forum in which they won’t be attacked....
Thanks to Leslie Graves, in last night's café, for pointing to that article. I'm giving this post my "blog commenting" tag because it relates to my experience here on the blog. Consider that a prompt for the conversation here. To me, the WSJ's observations seem pretty obvious. The trick is what to do about it. Comments are great and comments are horrible. To me, it's an endless struggle.
"They seem to fear a policy debate, which is exactly why a Schultz candidacy could be good for the country, including Democrats,"say the Editors of the Wall Street Journal (unfortunately, behind a pay wall).
The Democratic pundit class, which means nearly every pundit, rushed to say Mr. Schultz should stick to grande cappucinos and leave politics to the professionals who . . . lost to Mr. Trump.
They're trying to bully Mr. Schultz out of running, but along the way they're making the case for why he should. Take economics, where Ms. Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris and other Democrats wants Americans to shut up and jump on their bullet train to Bernie Sanders' utopia. On policy Mr. Schultz is closer to a John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton Democrat....
Democrats might benefit from reacquainting themselves with the private economy and wealth creation, which is damaged by punitive taxation. Mr. Schultz could point this out in debates....
Well, but wait. Schultz is talking about running as an independent. If he wanted to participate in debates, shouldn't he run as a Democrat?
Democrats should want to have this kind of debate in their primaries lest they anoint a nominee whose ideas turn out to be too radical to defeat even Mr. Trump, or to govern successfully if they beat him. But Democratic elites don't seem to want to hear anything that would interfere with socialism by acclamation.
As long as Schultz operates in a separate lane, heading for an independent run and avoiding those difficult primaries, the Democrats have a persuasive argument that they fear him as a spoiler who gets Trump elected. I imagine the Democrats themselves know that they are veering too far left, but what's stopping more moderate Democrats — like Schultz — from participating in the Democratic primaries?
Maybe there's a good answer to that question. And I realize that the "debate" in the larger sense can mean the entire public discourse and not just those old-time events with the lecterns and the moderators. But the WSJ wrote "debates" — "Mr. Schultz could point this out in debates" — and that seems to refer to those formal prime-time TV extravaganzas.
Trump killed in debates. He performed creative destruction on the Republican Party. But he was the more extreme person, faced with a set of moderates. If Schultz attempted to use a Trump strategy with the Democrats, he would be the moderate person faced with a set of more extreme candidates. From that position, he couldn't use Trumpish flamboyance, even if he had it in him, which he doesn't. If he stood on the stage with the lefty Democrats, I think he'd fade into nothingness, like... who? Do we even remember the most moderate participants in the early debates of the last presidential election season? I didn't. I had to look it up. Martin O'Malley... Lincoln Chaffee...
How can the moderate shake everything up? I mean, it would be my favorite thing to do — radical centrism. It's where my impulses — my paradoxically nonimpulsive impulses — take me. But I'm thoroughly used to getting no candidate that appeals to me and people like me don't shriek like teenagers at a horror movie. We just slump down in our seats and wonder when is this awful mess going to be over.
McGurn tones down my opinion. I don't say that "today's pious demands for civility are often less about good manners than shutting down folks with an opposing view." I say that the talk about civility is always bullshit. That is, it's only ever about getting the other side to shut up.
Said the editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal Gerard Baker, quoted in "Wall Street Journal Editor Admonishes Reporters Over Trump Coverage" in the NYT, which reminds us that "The Wall Street Journal is owned by the media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who speaks regularly with Mr. Trump and recently dined with the president at the White House."
On "Meet the Press" today, Chuck Todd — interviewing the NYT executive editor Dean Baquet — showed a disturbing inability to do his job, to be a professional journalist. I don't see what's so hard about understanding professionalism. You're a journalist, you cover the people in the news, and you don't let the subjects of the news shake you up by telling you you're doing it wrong. As long as you are following principles of professionalism — maybe you aren't and that's your problem — you should be able to stand your ground firmly. Yet somehow, Donald Trump's criticism of journalists is dogging him:
CHUCK TODD: This presents a very difficult situation. I face it myself personally from him sometimes, we face it as a network, where he personalizes coverage and disagreements about coverage with the organization and sometimes with individual reporters. You're a human being, I'm a human being. It's not easy sometimes doing that.
Is Todd play-acting, trying to drum up sympathy? It makes no sense. Consumers of journalism don't worry about how the reporters feel. But Todd could be mistaken and think acting wounded will cause viewers to want to defend him against mean old Trump. I doubt it. So maybe Todd really is hurting. But that seems ridiculous. Cover the news! If someone in the news is a gigantic bastard, so much the better for the news provider. Tell the story. What's this "I'm a human being" business?
Todd asks Baquet: "How are you instructing your journalists to handle the personal attacks that may come his way in a very public setting?" This is an odd question, and not just because of the awkward, ungrammatical "his." It assumes instruction must be given to reporters, like they're snowflakes in need of a safe room.
Baquet doesn't buy into the drama. He takes what I think is the obvious professional position: "[W]e have a huge obligation to cover this guy aggressively and fairly. And that means not letting personalities get in the way." He concedes that Trump's antagonism is "annoying" and takes note of a possible threat to First Amendment values, but he completely avoids the emotionalism of taking it personally. He puts any "personal stuff" "off to the side." Well, of course.
Next Todd brought on the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker. Todd played a clip of Trump calling the WSJ "a piece of garbage" and then asked Baker "How did you handle the direct attacks?"
Baker, like Baquet, took the professional approach. You just "get used to it." Trump has his style. The WSJ reporters know what it is. They deal with it. Baker observes that at least he can tell that Trump is reading his newspaper.
Bringing up a "leaked memo" from Baker that said "Everybody's got to be fair to him," Todd says:
Were you concerned that the personal attacks were going to make some of your reporters react? They're human. We're all human beings. And when you personally get attacked, it's hard to sort of set that aside.
There's that human business again.
Baker concedes he was "concerned," but immediately changes the subject from how reporters feel to what Trump is like. He's "different." And some reporters feel that they're in a "contest" with Trump, which sounds a tad emotional, but Baker doesn't pursue the feelings. He just says "it's reporters' jobs to take everybody on, you know, to test everything that a politician says against the truth." In other words: professionalism.
Said Newt Gingrich, asked on "Fox News Sunday" if he'd accept an offer to serve as Trump's running mate.
If he can convince Callista and me that it's doable and that it’s serious and we would, in fact, contribute I think we would be very hard pressed not to say yes.
Speaking of VP prospects on the Sunday shows, there was also Sherrod Brown on "State of the Union." He was hilariously blindsided. Jake Tapper played a clip from an ad he put out in his 2012 campaign for reelection to the Senate:
A Wall Street Journal editorial. (There's a subscription wall that you can bypass if you Google some of the text and get your own link.)
Milton Friedman once observed that the 1928 platform of the Socialist Party of America may have seemed radical at the time, but nearly all of it was eventually absorbed by mainstream parties and became law. That’s also Mr. Sanders’s hope. He wants to drive the Democratic Party debate to the left so it drags Hillary Clinton along with it.
And it may be working. Mrs. Clinton has already disavowed her husband’s trade agenda. She’s proposed a rewrite of the First Amendment to limit political speech, and don’t be surprised if she also embraces expanded entitlements. The difference is that Bernie believes what he says, while Hillary believes whatever seems necessary to win.
The practical political question is whether Mr. Sanders, or some other liberal gadfly, can do well enough to serve as a stalking horse for a stronger candidate against Mrs. Clinton. Recall how Eugene McCarthy drove LBJ out of the 1968 race with a strong performance in the New Hampshire primary. Robert Kennedy soon jumped in as a more electable antiwar candidate.
[NOTE: The last paragraph of this post is rewritten. Originally, it said: "And we ended up with LBJ, who really was someone who would say whatever was necessary to win." That's not a proper account of 1968!]
On Friday the Justices will consider whether to hear O’Keefe v. Chisholm, a Section 1983 civil-rights lawsuit brought by Wisconsin Club for Growth director Eric O’Keefe against Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm and other prosecutors. The suit charges the prosecutors with a multi-year campaign to silence and intimidate conservative groups whose political speech they don’t like....
The 7th Circuit's decision was based not on the merits but on deference to the ongoing proceedings in state court, which theoretically could have responded to the federal constitutional questions. That is: the Younger abstention doctrine. I discussed the 7th Circuit opinion when it came out last September, saying:
There is an exception to the Younger doctrine, which the plaintiffs tried to use here, that applies when the federal rights claimants show that the prosecutors in state court are proceeding in "bad faith." The question is whether the prosecutors are really attempting to secure a valid conviction or whether they are simply using the legal process to harass the federal court plaintiffs. The 7th Circuit panel found some perplexity in the free speech issues about campaign coordination:
The Supreme Court has yet to determine what “coordination” means. Is the scope of permissible regulation limited to groups that advocate the election of particular candidates, or can government also regulate coordination of contributions and speech about political issues, when the speakers do not expressly advocate any person’s election? What if the speech implies, rather than expresses, a preference for a particular candidate’s election? If regulation of coordination about pure issue advocacy is permissible, how tight must the link be between the politician’s committee and the advocacy group? Uncertainty is a powerful reason to leave this litigation in state court, where it may meet its end as a matter of state law without any need to resolve these constitutional questions.
This is a nudge to the state judge to shut down the investigation, and yet there is something very disturbing about this ambiguity in free speech law and the leeway it gives prosecutors to stall a political group throughout a campaign season. I'd like to see the Supreme Court make this clear....
Back to the WSJ editorial:
Specific injustices aside, the U.S. Justices should also hear the case because it is part of a larger legal effort to subvert their 2010 Citizens United ruling. The game is to use the theory of “coordination,” which allows vast investigations to be instigated on the thinnest evidence, to sweep issue speech back into the regulatory umbrella of campaign-finance law.
The liberal Brennan Center for Justice is pushing regulations coast to coast that would reduce protections for issue speakers and encourage “coordination” probes. The Wisconsin case is an opening for the Court to tell prosecutors and regulators they must tread carefully when rights of free association are involved.
Wisconsin’s prosecutorial machinery has abused the law to silence disfavored political speech. This one is made to order for Supreme Court review.
I agree. The Court needs to take this case. Quite aside from all the substantive problems, the idea of deferring to the state courts is supposed to be based on the ability of the state courts to step up and deal with the substantive problems themselves. The 7th Circuit decision came out 7 months ago. Where's the action from the state courts? If there are indeed free-speech violations, they've been going on for 3 years. It's one thing for federal courts to refrain from jumping into state court proceedings that might do a decent-enough job of enforcing federal rights. But here, these proceedings have worked to suppress political speech for 2 election cycles and beyond. It's quite shocking.
"Perhaps you didn't notice the lack of media outrage. That's the context in which to understand the breathless reporting about court documents showing that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker encouraged donations to the Wisconsin Club for Growth."
Write the editors of The Wall Street Journal, noting the "breathless page-one stories" about Walker's "criminal scheme" to coordinate campaign activities that didn't make it clear that all we were reading was "a prosecutorial theory floated to justify a secret grand-jury fishing expedition," that the documents were coming out as a result of a thus-far-successful civil-rights case against the prosecutors, and that "the two judges who have looked closely at the evidence have found no violations of law."
To the contrary, both judges have ruled that the prosecutors' theory of illegal campaign coordination is faulty and itself a violation of the defendants' right to free political speech. The document dump amounts to prosecutors losing in court but then having the press treat the prosecutors' claims as if they were the gospel truth.
Much more detail at the link. The details are complicated enough that you might feel tempted to forgive the press for jumping on the spicy "criminal scheme" business and not bothering to explain all the surrounding legalistic material, but I'll bet what determines whether you succumb to that temptation is whether you oppose Walker or not. And, of course, there is every reason to suspect that the press chose its presentation because it opposes Walker and snapped at the opportunity to try to bring him down.
[T]he document dump is serving a political purpose that prosecutors have intended from the start—to tarnish Mr. Walker as he seeks re-election.... This is typical of the behavior of Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm and Assistant DAs Bruce Landgraf and David Robles from the beginning. The Democrats hired [special prosecutor Francis] Schmitz, a nominal Republican, as special prosecutor to put a nonpartisan gloss on an investigation that the DAs realized would be seen for the political prosecution it was.
ADDED: My link may cause you to hit a pay wall. I really don't know why the WSJ wants to keep this editorial from having the effect the editors' words show they want. Anyway, try googling some text I've quoted and go in through the link you get that way.
I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for me to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
Encourage Althouse by making a donation:
Make a 1-time donation or set up a monthly donation of any amount you choose:
পোস্টগুলি
