The FAKE & FRAUDULENT NEWS MEDIA is working hard to convince Republicans and others I should not use social media - but remember, I won....
....the 2016 election with interviews, speeches and social media. I had to beat #FakeNews, and did. We will continue to WIN!
My use of social media is not Presidential - it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!
I am thinking about changing the name #FakeNews CNN to #FraudNewsCNN!
July 1, 2017
Saturday evening Trump tweetstorm — "My use of social media is not Presidential - it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL."
In chronological order:
"A LOT more beautiful (breathtaking, actually) places in Canada than that."
Said Original Mike in "The Canada Café," apparently under the impression that I am searching for what is beautiful/breathtaking as I do my virtual traveling and frame selections in Google Street view. That made me want to put up some more selections:
"Photobucket rolled out a new update to its TOS on June 26th with just a small, innocuous blog post as an announcement."
"Users have been finding out about it as their embedded images on other sites have turned into placeholders telling them to update their accounts, and as Photobucket has rolled out email notifications telling them that if they want to keep embedding images, they have to pay $399/year."
Horrific destruction of existing work by so many people.
If this happened to Flickr, I would lose my mind.
Horrific destruction of existing work by so many people.
If this happened to Flickr, I would lose my mind.
"Escaped elephant takes a stroll through Wisconsin neighborhood."
"Jaime Lynn, a Baraboo, Wisconsin resident... said she heard a dog barking and a neighbor scream, so she looked outside to see what was going on."
Baraboo is home of Circus World, so it can't have seemed that weird.
Baraboo is home of Circus World, so it can't have seemed that weird.
At the Canada Café...
... you can talk about whatever you want.
The picture is an image I selected from Google Street View in Blind River, Ontario. I picked Canada as the place to virtually visit because — as blogged earlier — today is the 150th anniversary of the confederation of Canada.
(And let me remind you, as I tend to do on these café posts, to consider using The Althouse Portal as you begin a shopping trip into Amazon.)
Trump blames NBC bosses for his troubles with Joe and Mika and points to the ousting of Greta Van Susteren as evidence.
Trump, not backing down, keeps tweeting about Joe and Mika, but he's not just standing his ground. He's advancing the theory. Here's his most recent tweet, from 2 hours ago:
That's the theory I read in this morning's tweets.
Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses. Too bad!That's his second shot at NBC this morning. Earlier he tweeted:
Word is that @Greta Van Susteren was let go by her out of control bosses at @NBC & @Comcast because she refused to go along w/ 'Trump hate!'In between those 2 tweets, he attacked that other network:
I am extremely pleased to see that @CNN has finally been exposed as #FakeNews and garbage journalism. It's about time!Those 3 tweets cohere into the theory that the bosses at NBC — like the bosses at CNN who were "exposed" in the Project Veritas video — are not following decent principles of journalism but chasing ratings. They think "Trump hate" works and they've pushed Joe, Mika, and Greta and only Greta had the guts and ethics to say no. Mika and Joe wouldn't be doing Trump hate on their own — they're not bad people — but they've got to perform in the ratings and they're following orders.
That's the theory I read in this morning's tweets.
"Turning off the streetlights saved about $1.25 million, but after thieves stole the copper wiring inside, the cost to fix the lights ran to some $5 million."
"Today, we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Confederation. We come together as Canadians..."
"... to celebrate the achievements of our great country, reflect on our past and present, and look boldly toward our future," says Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada.
At the heart of Canada’s story are millions of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. They exemplify what it means to be Canadian: ambitious aspirations, leadership driven by compassion, and the courage to dream boldly....
As we mark Canada 150, we also recognize that for many, today is not an occasion for celebration. Indigenous Peoples in this country have faced oppression for centuries. As a society, we must acknowledge and apologize for past wrongs, and chart a path forward for the next 150 years – one in which we continue to build our nation-to-nation, Inuit-Crown, and government-to-government relationship with the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Nation....
Uncombable hair syndrome.
It's a real medical condition — genetic and very rare.
It is usually characterized by silvery-blond or straw-colored hair that is disorderly; stands out from the scalp; and cannot be combed flat.... When the individual hair strands are viewed under a microscope, the hair is either triangular or kidney-shaped on cross section, and has a canal-like longitudinal groove along one or two faces....Here are video and photos of a cute little girl who has the syndrome
Trump's supporters and critics agree that Trump's tweeting is going to destroy civilization...
... and Scott Adams tells you how that's going to happen.
ADDED: "Part of what makes things funny if you're from New York is the horribleness of them, the inappropriateness. So it's the inappropriate part that makes it funny, that makes it entertaining, that makes it worth doing. It's the inappropriate part. So when I see the President doing inappropriate things, I say to myself: Well, there's a guy from New York talking."
ADDED: "Part of what makes things funny if you're from New York is the horribleness of them, the inappropriateness. So it's the inappropriate part that makes it funny, that makes it entertaining, that makes it worth doing. It's the inappropriate part. So when I see the President doing inappropriate things, I say to myself: Well, there's a guy from New York talking."
"President Trump’s voting commission stumbled into public view this week, issuing a sweeping request for nationwide voter data that drew sharp condemnation..."
"... from election experts and resistance from more than two dozen states that said they cannot or will not hand over all of the data," WaPo reports.
There's also a privacy argument, which I think I would find more compelling, but the WaPo article does not put in words what the privacy problem is. It merely cites an "elections expert" (Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School) and says he "pointed to the request about voters’ party affiliations, which he said violates the federal Privacy Act of 1974." So WaPo doesn't quote Levitt, doesn't give the text of the Privacy Act, and doesn't give any substance to what the privacy interests are and how they are impaired.
It's as though they want us to think the privacy argument is bad or, worse, they're writing for a liberal audience and they don't care about the argument that appeals to a more conservative mind. If they did, they might talk about federalism and the way the Constitution gives the states the role of running elections for members of Congress (with a role given to Congress — not the executive branch — to regulate how the states handle their elections). And the states have the role of determining how to select the electors who choose the President.
It seems as though WaPo can't report this story without pushing the usual agenda, characterizing Republicans as bent on disenfranchising people.
ADDED: Trump tweeted this morning:
The immediate backlash marked the first significant attention to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity since Trump started it last month and followed through on a vow to pursue his own unsubstantiated claims that voter fraud is rampant and cost him the popular vote in the presidential election. The White House has said the commission will embark upon a “thorough review of registration and voting issues in federal elections,” but experts and voting rights advocates have pilloried Trump for his claims of widespread fraud, which studies and state officials alike have not found. They say that they fear the commission will be used to restrict voting.So, there's the fear that the Commission will find things that may be either true or false but that, either way, people don't want to know — especially because it will leverage arguments that things must be done that they don't want to have to do.
There's also a privacy argument, which I think I would find more compelling, but the WaPo article does not put in words what the privacy problem is. It merely cites an "elections expert" (Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School) and says he "pointed to the request about voters’ party affiliations, which he said violates the federal Privacy Act of 1974." So WaPo doesn't quote Levitt, doesn't give the text of the Privacy Act, and doesn't give any substance to what the privacy interests are and how they are impaired.
It's as though they want us to think the privacy argument is bad or, worse, they're writing for a liberal audience and they don't care about the argument that appeals to a more conservative mind. If they did, they might talk about federalism and the way the Constitution gives the states the role of running elections for members of Congress (with a role given to Congress — not the executive branch — to regulate how the states handle their elections). And the states have the role of determining how to select the electors who choose the President.
It seems as though WaPo can't report this story without pushing the usual agenda, characterizing Republicans as bent on disenfranchising people.
ADDED: Trump tweeted this morning:
Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?
June 30, 2017
"Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own."
That's the famous quote — the "three rules of life" — from the 1956 novel "A Walk on the Wild Side," by Nelson Algren.
I was just exploring in Google Street View and I came to a town in Florida called Sopchoppy — known for its Worm Grunting Festival — where I was entranced by this sign for the place I'd always heard of, Mom's:
I was just exploring in Google Street View and I came to a town in Florida called Sopchoppy — known for its Worm Grunting Festival — where I was entranced by this sign for the place I'd always heard of, Mom's:
"In one way, travelling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting..."
"... which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.... Freud was brilliantly right when he wrote about 'the narcissism of the small difference': distinctions that seem trivial to the visitor are the obsessive concern of the local and the provincial minds... And when you hear the bigots talk about the 'other,' it’s always in the same tones as their colonial bosses used to employ to talk about them. (Dirty, prone to crime, lazy, very untrustworthy with women and—this is especially toxic—inclined to breed rapidly.)"
From "Letters to a Young Contrarian," by Christopher Hitchens.
From "Letters to a Young Contrarian," by Christopher Hitchens.
"It suddenly hit me. That’s what people want to see. That’s what I’ll give them, blood and gore."
Said Generoso Pope, Jr., the founder of The National Enquirer, who had begun the newspaper as "a serious, upscale weekly," but "had an epiphany one day when he found himself gazing at a particularly gruesome traffic accident, and noticed how many other people had also stopped to stare."
He's quoted in a New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin that has a title — "The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump/The tabloid is defined by its predatory spirit. Why has it embraced the President with such sycophantic zeal?" — that makes it seem pretty blood-and-gore — metaphorically, anyway. But it turns out to be more of a — how you say? — nothingburger.
I did though enjoy reading about the early history of the paper. I remember stealing glimpses of The Enquirer at newsstands back in the mid-60s, when it was considered too evil for a decent person to look at. As The New Yorker puts it:
Pope had a second epiphany in the late 60s which was to sell the paper at the supermarket checkout display.
Those were simpler times, back when Princess Di was blasting heartless Fergie for inadequate baby care. Today, the Enquirer is run by David Pecker, and most of Toobin's article is about Pecker, who is friends with Donald Trump, but Toobin didn't dig up anything shocking about the Pecker-n-Trump bromance, so I left the table still hungry.
Fortunately, The National Enquirer popped into the news today: "Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough’s Extortion Claim Against Donald Trump and the National Enquirer." That too is by Toobin in The New Yorker. Trump used extortion against Mika and Joe??
But in Mika and Joe's telling, it was only Trump's staffers urging them to get Trump to intercede with the third party — The Enquirer — that was threatening to harm them. But it takes another few leaps to get to the idea that The Enquirer was in cahoots with Trump, cooking up a negative story against Mika and Joe to work as a threat that would bring them begging to Trump and that if they had done so, Trump would have extracted from them a commitment to give him good coverage on their show.
As Toobin puts it:
What a screwy mess! I attempted to watch "Morning Joe" today, but it was so dumb and slow-moving I couldn't put up with it. In the little I saw, I was mostly fascinated by the visual: Mika and Joe looked incredibly glum, positively morose. What's the problem? Why aren't they happy that they got under the President's skin and have everyone talking about them? How can it hurt? Is it just that people are motivated to dig up the terrible story that The Enquirer in fact published about them earlier this month? Or is there something more to this — some trap Trump has set with his oddball tweet about Mika's "bleeding badly from a face-lift"?
Everybody stopped to stare. That’s what people want to see. That’s what I’ll give them, blood and gore.
He's quoted in a New Yorker article by Jeffrey Toobin that has a title — "The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump/The tabloid is defined by its predatory spirit. Why has it embraced the President with such sycophantic zeal?" — that makes it seem pretty blood-and-gore — metaphorically, anyway. But it turns out to be more of a — how you say? — nothingburger.
I did though enjoy reading about the early history of the paper. I remember stealing glimpses of The Enquirer at newsstands back in the mid-60s, when it was considered too evil for a decent person to look at. As The New Yorker puts it:
In the fifties and sixties, the [blood and gore] formula was a resounding success. With headlines like “mom boiled her baby and ate her” and photographs of purported freaks of nature, such as two-headed babies, circulation soared to more than a million.I can still remember getting drawn into the story of a murderer who cut up a body and put the head in some kind of box and threw a foot out the window. There was a photograph of a severed foot. Was it still wearing the cut-off end of a nylon stocking?
Pope had a second epiphany in the late 60s which was to sell the paper at the supermarket checkout display.
This required him to scale back the gore (which was unacceptable to the markets) and amp up the celebrity coverage. The transformation proved a boon to business. So did a television campaign featuring the catchphrase “Enquiring minds want to know.”The grisly gunk was gone, and we got the insane, cheerful message that we were sorta intellectual — "enquiring" — to want to know pointless crap about celebrities:
Those were simpler times, back when Princess Di was blasting heartless Fergie for inadequate baby care. Today, the Enquirer is run by David Pecker, and most of Toobin's article is about Pecker, who is friends with Donald Trump, but Toobin didn't dig up anything shocking about the Pecker-n-Trump bromance, so I left the table still hungry.
Fortunately, The National Enquirer popped into the news today: "Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough’s Extortion Claim Against Donald Trump and the National Enquirer." That too is by Toobin in The New Yorker. Trump used extortion against Mika and Joe??
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have just caused a sensation by claiming, in effect, that they were extorted by Donald Trump and the National Enquirer. According to their op-ed in the Washington Post, White House staffers told them that the tabloid would run damaging stories about them unless they could persuade the President to intervene.At that link to the WaPo op-ed, the word "extortion" is not used. It just says:
This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.Why would White House staffers be "desperate" to save Mika and Joe from a negative article? And where's the "extortion"? Extortion is a legal term. It is the actual or threatened use of "force, violence, or fear" to obtain property from someone. I think Toobin's idea is that the threat and what was to be extorted with the threat were both press coverage: Trump was trying to get good coverage from Joe and Mika by threatening them with bad coverage from The Enquirer.
But in Mika and Joe's telling, it was only Trump's staffers urging them to get Trump to intercede with the third party — The Enquirer — that was threatening to harm them. But it takes another few leaps to get to the idea that The Enquirer was in cahoots with Trump, cooking up a negative story against Mika and Joe to work as a threat that would bring them begging to Trump and that if they had done so, Trump would have extracted from them a commitment to give him good coverage on their show.
As Toobin puts it:
[I]t’s certainly possible that there was some connection between the Enquirer story about Scarborough and Brzezinski and Trump’s quest for favorable coverage from “Morning Joe.” Bizarrely enough, Trump’s most recent tweet suggests that he served as the middleman between the anchors and the magazine, though he denies that he did ultimately intervene.The recent Trump tweet is: "Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show."
What a screwy mess! I attempted to watch "Morning Joe" today, but it was so dumb and slow-moving I couldn't put up with it. In the little I saw, I was mostly fascinated by the visual: Mika and Joe looked incredibly glum, positively morose. What's the problem? Why aren't they happy that they got under the President's skin and have everyone talking about them? How can it hurt? Is it just that people are motivated to dig up the terrible story that The Enquirer in fact published about them earlier this month? Or is there something more to this — some trap Trump has set with his oddball tweet about Mika's "bleeding badly from a face-lift"?
Everybody stopped to stare. That’s what people want to see. That’s what I’ll give them, blood and gore.
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