"Wait, people are leaving blue democrat-run states, and moving to republican-run red states? Perhaps the Democratic Party needs to look at the reasons why."

"Dems have a really tough time admitting they could be wrong, about anything. Maybe they are wrong about their policies, and people are voting, with their feet."

That's the top-rated comment at a New York Times article — "How the Electoral College Could Tilt Further From Democrats" — about "the nightmare scenario many Democratic Party insiders see playing out if current U.S. population projections hold" after the 2040 census.

The next 4 most highly rated comments are similar:

Why hadn't the NYT told us about this? "In July, New York Times reporters witnessed other Adams supporters handing out red envelopes with cash at three separate campaign events..."

"... one in Flushing, Queens; another in Manhattan’s Chinatown; and a third in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. At those events, Mr. Adams picked up support from leaders of influential Chinese community groups, including several with close ties to the Chinese government.... At the event in Flushing on July 13... [0]ne of the organizers, Steven Tin, the director of Better Chinatown USA, which hosts the Lunar New Year parades in Manhattan’s Chinatown, was seen by The Times holding $50 bills and handing out red envelopes to reporters from Chinese-language news organizations. At the event, Mr. Tin said that it is a common practice in Chinese culture to give cash to 'reporters, YouTubers, photographers' as a 'thank you for coming' gift...."

From "Red Envelopes With Cash Are Changing Hands at Adams Campaign Rallies/New York Times reporters witnessed supporters of Mayor Eric Adams handing out cash-filled envelopes. Sometimes, that money went to reporters from Chinese-language outlets" (NYT).

Why did the NYT sit on this until after The City published "Eric Adams Advisor Winnie Greco Handed a CITY Reporter Cash Stuffed in a Bag of Potato Chips/THE CITY reported the incident to law enforcement and was promptly contacted by the Brooklyn U.S. attorney’s office"? That came out on the evening of August 20th. (Here's my blog post about it from midday yesterday.)

Was everyone tolerating this practice until the City reporter openly objected to it? Why was the City reporter's envelope delivered inside a potato chip back if it was not understood to be wrong? The NYT writes, "No established American news organization permits its reporters to accept cash payments for covering events" and "The Times’s ethical guidelines explicitly prohibit receipt of such gifts." And the NYT reporters seem to have witnessed the open delivery of red envelopes, without snack-food camouflage. Perhaps The City was viewed as in the gray zone between "established American news organization" and news organizations that had already been initiated into a system of paying for news coverage.

The NYT doesn't explain its waiting to publish. Perhaps it was working on a more detailed story explaining pervasive corruption and it just got scooped. 

Too good to check? Were the "Terry and Julie" of "Waterloo Sunset" Terence Stamp and Julie Christie?

I'm reading "Terence Stamp’s Swinging, Smoldering Style/He helped redefine male beauty, ushering in the era of the cinematic bad boy" by the NYT style reporter Guy Trebay. (Stamp died last Sunday at the age of 87.) 

Trebay writes: "In his 20s, when he sought a life beyond the straitened circumstances of his upbringing, he became a favorite of the London tabloids that relentlessly chronicled his relationships with the model Jean Shrimpton and the actress Julie Christie. His romantic life was at one point so well known that he and Ms. Christie inspired the 'Terry and Julie' in the Kinks song 'Waterloo Sunset,' released at the height of the mid-1960s music and fashion scene known as Swinging London."

If we go over to Genius.com to find the lyrics, we see: 

"The Russiagate scandal has long been one of the most convoluted, hard-to-follow news stories of all time...."

"Those of us who covered the story from the start had a difficult time explaining to audiences what it was, as we ourselves didn’t know. Now we do.... Finally, it seems, we can explain.... It wasn’t the start of a corruption story about Trump, but the cover-up of a still-unresolved Hillary Clinton scandal. This is purely a Clinton corruption story.... With the help of the declassified Durham material, we can explain the whole affair in three brushstrokes. One, Hillary Clinton and her team apparently hoped to deflect from her email scandal and other problems via a campaign tying Trump to Putin. Two, American security services learned of these plans. Three — and this is the most important part — instead of outing them, authorities used state resources to massively expand and amplify her scheme.... Hillary Clinton got in a jam, and the FBI, CIA, and the Obama White House got her out of it by setting Trump up. That’s it...."

Writes Matt Taibbi, in "No Doubt Left: Russiagate Was a Cover-Up/The most infuriatingly complex scandal of all time has just been reduced to a page or two, thanks to another declassified release" (Substack).

More from Taibbi at "The New York Times Can't Stop Sucking/How many times can one newspaper screw up a story?" (Substack).

ADDED: This post is really a place-holder. It marks my own nonfollowing of the story. Notice what I am quoting — Taibbi's acknowledgment that the story is too hard for people to follow. And it's not as though he's solving the problem for us. The quoted material is conclusory assertion. For someone who isn't already pro- or anti-Trump, you still have no way to sort out what's true. I also read The New York Times, and here's Taibbi telling me The New York Times is systematically screwing it up. Maybe. How am I supposed to know? 

If it's Trump news, the good news can't be good news.

Headline at The New York Times scrambles to squelch whatever lift you might get from the news that the economy grew in the second quarter: "U.S. Economy Grew in Second Quarter as Tariffs Scrambled Data/Gross domestic product rebounded in the spring after contracting at the start of the year, but consumer spending remained weak" (NYT).

We're serving tariff-scrambled data this morning. 

Let's read the text:

Economic growth softened in the first half of the year, as tariffs and uncertainty upended business plans and scrambled consumers’ spending decisions.

Your brains are scrambled! There's growth, but it's soft-boiled growth. Yuck!

The disruptions extended to the economic data itself.

"The United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee quietly changed its eligibility rules on Monday to bar transgender women from competing in Olympic women’s sports..."

"... and now will comply with President Trump’s executive order on the issue, according to a post on the organization’s website. The new policy, expressed in a short, vaguely worded paragraph, is tucked under the category of 'USOPC Athlete Safety Policy' on the site, and does not include details of how the ban will work. Nor does the new policy include the word 'transgender' or the title of Mr. Trump’s executive order, 'Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,' referring to it instead as 'Executive Order 14201.'"

From "U.S. Olympic Officials Bar Transgender Women From Women’s Competitions/The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee changed its eligibility rules on Monday to comply with President Trump’s executive order, taking the decision away from national governing bodies for each sport" (NYT).

Interesting language, especially "tucked under." It seems to evoke the effort of a biological man to pass as a woman. Did the NYT want us to see an analogy there? The U.S. Olympic Committee wants to look like it is what it wants to be. In this analogy, following Trump’s executive order corresponds to the male genitalia that must be "tucked under" and the look of female genitalia is achieved with the words "USOPC Athlete Safety Policy."

If that's not intentional, the editing at the NYT is incompetent/nonexistent. If it is intentional, it's hilarious and very very wrong.

"With Taxes and Tariffs in Place, Trump Takes Reins of U.S. Economy President/Trump has achieved much of his agenda, leaving the fate of the economy squarely in his hands."

A surprisingly pro-Trump headline in the NYT, so I guess he really deserves it.

His expensive tax cuts have been signed into law. His steep global tariffs are taking clearer shape. And his twin campaigns to deregulate government and deport immigrants are well underway. With the major components of his agenda now coming into focus, President Trump has already left an indelible mark on the U.S. economy. The triumphs and turbulence that may soon arise will squarely belong to him.

To give him credit is to set him up for blame. 

Not even six months into his second term, Mr. Trump has forged ahead with the grand and potentially disruptive economic experiment that he first previewed during the 2024 campaign. His actions in recent weeks have staked the future of the nation’s finances — and its centuries-old trading relationships — on a belief that many economists’ most dire warnings are wrong.... 

So far, the U.S. economy has remained resilient in the face of these seismic changes....

"It felt like the New York Times didn’t understand New York City. It was this strangely conservative law-and-order, traditionalist view..."

".. that totally missed the reality of the city today. My view is people are hurting and affordability is the issue and the Times just does not understand what everyday people are going through. They’ve disconnected from New York City more and more with every passing year. Obviously, they decided they didn’t care enough about New York City to make an editorial endorsement and then they show up with this wimpy, disingenuous editorial basically justifying why people should vote for someone corrupt in Andrew Cuomo, and not even recognizing that other new leaders had worthy ideas. I mean, the whole thing was like, 'Let’s invalidate new young leaders,' right? It was unbelievably ageist and out of touch."

Said Bill de Blasio, quoted in "Bill de Blasio on Andrew Cuomo and That Nasty Times Op-Ed/The former mayor has a few things to get off his chest" (NY Magazine).

"But as Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish writer and politician, noted, 'Antisemitism is a light sleeper.' It tends to re-emerge..."

"... when societies become polarized and people go looking for somebody to blame. This pattern helps explain why antisemitism began rising, first in Europe and then in the United States, in the 2010s, around the same time that politics coarsened.... The political right, including President Trump, deserves substantial blame....  Mr. Trump himself praised as 'very fine people' the attendees of a 2017 march in Charlottesville, Va., that featured the chant 'Jews will not replace us.' On Jan. 6, 2021, at least one rioter attacking the Capitol screamed that he was looking for 'the big Jew,' referring to Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Schumer has said.... Joe Rogan, the podcaster who endorsed Mr. Trump last year, has hosted Holocaust conspiracy theorists on his show. Mr. Rogan once said of Jews, 'They run everything.'... [Antisemitism also] has a home on the progressive left.... They have failed to denounce antisemitism in the unequivocal ways that they properly denounce other bigotry.... Americans should be able to recognize the nuanced nature of many political debates while also recognizing that antisemitism has become an urgent problem. It is a different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism. Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life expectancy in today’s America. Yet the new antisemitism has left Jewish Americans at a greater risk of being victimized by a hate crime than any other group.... No political arguments or ideological context can justify that bigotry...."

From The Editorial Board of the New York Times, "Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses."

Why doesn't the phrase "Special Government Employee" appear in the NYT article about Musk's "distancing" himself from Trump?

I've been trying to read "A Disillusioned Musk, Distanced From Trump, Says He’s Exiting Washington/The billionaire has made clear he is frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he tried to upend the federal bureaucracy."

That piece in the NYT has 5 authors: Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman,Theodore Schleifer, Jonathan Swan, and Ryan Mac.

In the midst of my struggle to absorb their message, I stumbled upon this easy-to-read tweet (which was re-tweeted by Elon Musk):

In the coming days, legacy media will try to convince you that President Trump and Elon Musk are no longer friends and that’s why Musk left.

What they won’t tell you is that Elon was a Special Government Employee, limited to 130 days of service and that term ends tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/blNzVm9Gnd

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) May 29, 2025

From the NYT article:

Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment. In a post on X, his social media site, on Wednesday night, he officially confirmed for the first time that his stint as a government employee was coming to an end and thanked Mr. Trump “for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.”

So, instead of the phrase "Special Government Employee" — which appears at the post the NYT links — the Times makes it "government employee." And instead of noting the 130-day time limit built into the status of "Special Government Employee," the Times just says "his stint" is "coming to an end." And it adds the phrase "he officially confirmed for the first time" which makes it sound like a new development or something he'd previously kept under wraps. But the time limit was there from the start and official all along, so why did it matter that he "officially confirmed" it. Was it ever in question?

Perhaps the Times had previously cast doubt on whether Musk would leave when the 130 days ran out. 

Ah, yes, here's a NYT article from April 23 — "A Subdued Musk Backs Away From Washington, but His Project Remains" — that ends: "By dialing back the number of days he spends working for the White House, Mr. Musk can also potentially stretch out the 130 days he is allotted as a 'special government employee.'" And here, on April 18 — in "Head of I.R.S. Is Ousted in Treasury’s Power Struggle With Elon Musk"— "As a special government employee, Mr. Musk is allotted 130 days of time on the job. But if he works part time, he may be able to extend his time in government."

The names Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are on both of those.

"I think the NYT has framed men as a problem. They're not thriving, they're not aspiring. We need to figure out what's wrong with them..."

"... maybe even empathize with them, because, after all, we do need them to function."

So I said, in the previous post. And one reason I said it was because I'd already opened a tab for a second article on the home page of the NYT today: "Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone? I have many guy friends. Why don’t we hang out more?"

This is a long piece in the NYT Magazine, by Sam Graham-Felsen, and like the article discussed in the previous post, it assures us that there's nothing gay going on here: "I never had sexual feelings for Rob, but there was an intensity to our connection that can only be described as love. I thought about him all the time, and cared, deeply, about what he thought of me. We got jealous and mad at each other, and often argued like a bitter married couple — but eventually, like a successful married couple, we’d always find a way to talk things out."

Graham-Felsen has had many other close male friends — "nearly a dozen other dudes — dudes I spent thousands of accumulated hours with; dudes I shared my most shame-inducing secrets with; dudes I built incredibly intricate, ever-evolving inside jokes with; dudes I loved and needed, and who loved and needed me...." 

But he doesn't have dudes like that anymore. Is that because he's older, and his contemporaries are absorbed in family and work, or is it because American men in general "are getting significantly worse at friendship"?

"While planning the first major overseas trip of his second term, a four-day swing through Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates..."

"... Mr. Trump told his advisers that he wanted to announce deals that would be worth more than $1 trillion. As a branding exercise it makes perfect sense. Surrounded by resource-rich royals and American business executives, Mr. Trump, who likes to brag about his deal-making skills, will scrawl his Sharpie over term sheets, and lots of them. He will visit palaces, walk on red carpets and be treated like a king in a region that is increasingly vital to the Trump family’s financial interests. Yet as a strategic exercise, the trip’s purpose remains foggy...."

From "Trump Heads to the Middle East With a Single Goal: Deals, Deals, Deals/President Trump has always viewed the presidency as a worldwide hunt for deals. And there is no better place for that than the Gulf, where a few men wield absolute authority over vast wealth" (NYT).

"‘Mommy, the guy who’s been giving money to our school doesn’t want to give it to us anymore."

Said a little kindergarten boy, quoted in "The Zuckerbergs Founded Two Bay Area Schools. Now They’re Closing. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, opened the schools to help communities of color. Some families wonder if the shutting of the schools is related to his D.E.I. retrenchment" (NYT).

Why doesn't the guy who’s been giving money to the school not want to give it anymore? Even if Zuck has turned against DEI efforts within institutions, this is a free-standing school, located in a place where it serves underprivileged children. That sounds like a traditional charity. Why would you cut that off? The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has given only $100 million to this school over the past 4 years. What's that in the larger scheme of Zuckerberg's wealth? You're just suddenly casting out hundreds of children you've made a show of saving from the "trauma" you attributed to their status as "low-income." I'm sorry, I don't see how closing the school is worth doing. 

What is the evidence that the closure of the school represents opposition to the greater DEI agenda? I'm seeing this:

"Jury Rules Against Palin in Libel Case Against The New York Times."

The NYT reports.

Ms. Palin sued The Times in 2017 after the newspaper published — and then swiftly corrected and apologized for — an editorial that wrongly suggested that she had incited a deadly shooting in Arizona years earlier.

The case became a bellwether for battles over press freedoms and media bias in the Trump era, with Ms. Palin’s lawyers saying they hoped to use it to attack a decades-old Supreme Court precedent that makes it harder for public figures to sue news outlets for defamation....

During the trial, Ms. Palin told the jury that the editorial “kicked the oomph” right out of her, damaging her reputation. She said it had ignited another round of criticism of her years after the map was first distributed.

"Vietnam Offers to Drop U.S. Tariffs to Zero. Will That Be Enough for Trump?"

A New York Times headline reports the good news for Trump but the good is not enough for the New York Times. The good news must be balanced with bad news, even if it's just a nudging toward amorphous doubt. You know that Trump. There's always more disruption and chaos coming. 

What will the NYT say if Trump's tariffs have this effect across the board and all countries drop their tariffs? Will the NYT credit Trump for his success — for his audacious, clever move?

I see that yesterday, the NYT had this headline: "Musk Says He Hopes Europe and U.S. Move to a ‘Zero-Tariff Situation’/The billionaire adviser to the Trump administration appeared to part ways with the president in a videoconference appearance with Italy’s far-right League party." I give the Times credit for slipping in that weasel word, "appeared." The 2 men appeared to part ways. And it appears different today. Now that Vietnam has responded to the incentive — oh, look at that! — the 2 men seem to be going the same way.

Well, they looked like that yesterday too, but the NYT needed to continue on its way, making trouble for Trump. There's always bad news inside any good news.

I need a phrase that's the reverse of "Every cloud has a silver lining." Maybe: "Every pong-pong fruit has its deadly poison seeds." I mean, to hell with the agitation in New York Times headlines! Tonight is the finale of Season 3 of "The White Lotus." Those seeds are getting into one of those protein smoothies Patrick Schwarzenegger keeps whipping up, right? 

"Less than a week before the 2024 presidential election... [u]sing the now-disgraced and shuttered 538 as its unimpeachable source..."

"... the [New York] Times scoffed at a number of the latest polls that showed Trump leading. A 'torrent of polls began arriving just a few weeks ago, one after the other, most showing a victory for Donald J. Trump,' wrote the Times. These polls 'stood out amid the hundreds of others indicating a dead heat in the presidential election.'... [T]he Times accused those pollsters — 37 in all — of being 'focused on lifting Republican enthusiasm before the election' and 'cementing the idea that the only way Mr. Trump can lose to Vice President Kamala Harris is if the election is rigged.'... 'Unlike its competitors, RealClearPolitics does not filter out low-quality polls' and also 'does not weight its averages.' Which is just another way of saying that, unlike 538 (which got the election wrong and has lost so much money and credibility it just closed in disgrace), RCP does not put its thumb on the scale. It lists the polls and offers the averages, and that’s it...."

From "Far-Left NY Times Owes RealClearPolitics Apology After 538 Shutdown" (Breitbart).

"DOGE: Looks like Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department of Defense to study 'large scale social deception.' GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!"

Writes Trump on Truth Social, here.

This is also Trump on Truth Social: "DOGE: Why was Politico paid Millions of Dollars for NOTHING. Buying the press??? PAY BACK THE MONEY TO THE TAXPAYERS! How much has the Failing New York Times paid? Is this the money that is keeping it open??? THEY ARE BUYING THE PRESS!"

Is he saying there's an obligation to give back the money, that it was fraudulently obtained? Perhaps it's more of an appeal to give the money back as a gift, now that the taxpayers are seeing what happened and disapproving.

Trump doesn't take much care with these "truths" — that's what the press secretary calls them, "truths." He wrote "How much has the Failing New York Times paid?" when he must mean "How much has the Failing New York Times been paid?" He took the trouble to add "Failing" (idiosyncratically capitalized), but he omitted a word and left the meaning reversed.

"Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government/The billionaire is creating major upheaval as his team sweeps through agencies, in what has been an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual."

This is an important NYT article — with 6 authors (including Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman) — and I've been trying to force myself to blog it since yesterday evening. I'd read the article and thought of some idea of how to present it. 

"Aggressive Incursion" — was I going meditate on the meaning of "incursion" and the avoidance of its thesaurus roommate "coup"?

Now, I've delayed so long I'm tempted to just drop this and run...

Fraud in the federal government is closer to 10% of disbursements, so more like ~$700 billion per year.

Outright waste is at least 15%, so another trillion+ dollars.

Anyone who works in government knows this. https://t.co/P0622Wr2Y6

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

... but I'll go on. I'll find my way back to where I was going. Ah, yes. It was this:

"During my first 24 years at the Times, from 2000 to 2024, I faced very few editorial constraints on how and what I wrote...."

"[T]he editing was very light... even when I took positions that made Times leadership very nervous.... [T]he columns themselves were published as I wrote them.... Then, step by step, all the things that made writing at the Times worthwhile for me were taken away.... [I]n 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive... toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument.... ... I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless....  [W]hat I felt during my final year at the Times was a push toward blandness, toward avoiding saying anything too directly in a way that might get some people (particularly on the right) riled up. I guess my question is, if those are the ground rules, why even bother having an opinion section?"

Writes Paul Krugman, in "Departing the New York Times/I left to stay true to my byline" (The Contrarian).

What's going on there? Who wants blandly written columns? That doesn't solve any problem I'm aware of.

What the NYT is saying today under the heading "Trump Transition."

On the front page of the NYT website right now:

 

1. "Trump’s Night-Owl Tendencies Set Stage for After-Hours Diplomacy." When you click through, the  headline becomes "Trump’s Transition Business Largely Happens After Night Falls." I prefer the front-page headline because it focuses on Trump, the person.