How any good news for Trump will be reported — the rule is quite clear.

I'm seeing 2 big examples of how the media are reporting good news for Trump this weekend. It's really embarrassing for them because the 2 stories are very big and very good for Trump and, in both, the same move is made to turn it into something negative and ominous.

1. The Mueller investigation has concluded, and though we can't read it yet, we know that it means that there will be no charges against Trump or any of his people that have to do with colluding with Russians to affect the election. Though some Russians were charged and some of Trump's people were charged with lying to investigators, the whole reason for the special investigation seems to have been a phantom. After 2 years of uncertainty and anxiety, this is an immense relief and vindication for Trump. Fantastic, upbeat news. Now, here's how the NYT is presenting the story on the top, left corner of its front page:

As Mueller Report Lands, Prosecutorial Focus Moves to New York

The work by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, may be done, but prosecutors in Manhattan and elsewhere are pursuing about a dozen other investigations.

It all but ensures that a legal threat will continue to loom over the Trump presidency.

2. Under Trump, the Islamic State has been ousted entirely from the territory it had taken over. This is a distinct, satisfying military victory in what has been a long and difficult war. It is the second story on the NYT front page right now, where it looks like this:

THE ISLAMIC STATE

Its Territory May Be Gone, but the U.S. Fight Against ISIS Is Far From Over

• Thousands of Islamic State fighters are still at large in Iraq and Syria, rearming and regrouping.

• The U.S. and its partners still face significant battles against the group elsewhere, in Afghanistan, West Africa and the Philippines.

So watch for it. The rule is: When something good for Trump happens, find the nearest bad thing and make that the focus of the news report.

AND: At WaPo, it's "Trump’s legal troubles are far from over even as Mueller probe ends" and — though it's crowded with many headlines — there's nothing about ISIS on the front page at all. The closest thing is:

Looking for news of the victory against ISIS, I went to the page for Middle East news. There were 15 headlines, and only one, the 9th, related to ISIS. It was: "Iraqi and Kurdish authorities are torturing children to confess ISIS membership, report says."

At the Saturday Mouse Cafe...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Pete Buttigieg is the antidote to the Endless Summer of Scam. He’s full of the elite qualifications that you might rightly suspect..."

"... but provides depth in real time before you. He went to Afghanistan, but hasn’t made himself out to be a war hero. He fluently draws parallels between Ulysses and American politics. He learned Norwegian to read a book. He learned Norwegian to read a book. He has a lot of sober, curveball theories about millennials and generational change.... This is a 37-year-old mayor. In any normal situation, we probably would not be talking about him in context of being president of the United States. But in the season of scam, the subtle appeal of Mayor Pete is that, maybe, at the very least, he’s done the work of being who he purports to be."

From "The Romance Of Mayor Pete In The Season Of Scam/Gotta keep an eye out for those scams, but isn't the appeal of Pete Buttigieg that he seems like the antidote to the season of scam?" by Katherine Miller (in Buzzfeed).

I'm fascinated by the conundrum. It's the "Summer of Scam"* and he seems like the antidote to scam.  But isn't that what a scam within a season of scam would look like? We're so hungry for authenticity that we fall for the biggest faker or all? Or did we already do that?

By the way, I watched the HBO documentary, "The Inventor," about that way over-the-top faker Elizabeth Holmes — the woman who was worth $5 billion one day and then $0 the next because her her blood-testing product, "Edison," didn't work and, apparently, couldn't possibly work. But people who should have smelled fakery hopped on board, mesmerized. Wouldn't it be wonderful if it were true.

AND: What I wondered was which author did Buttigieg want to read in the original so much. Here's a BBC article:

Writer Asne Seierstad was introduced to Pete Buttigieg, a presidential candidate and the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, at a music festival in Texas last week. Without missing a beat, he began to speak with her about literature - in Norwegian.

Mr Buttigieg has "a South Bend accent", she says, but otherwise his Norwegian was excellent. Still she felt confused and wondered: "Why would an American learn Norwegian?" As it turned out, he'd decided that he wanted to read the work of Norwegian novelist Erlend Loe in the original language.

Here's an Erland Loe book translated into English: "Naïve. Super."

I have two friends. A good one and a bad one. And then there's my brother. He might not be quite as friendly as I am, but he's OK.

I am borrowing my brother's flat while he is away.... My life has been strange lately. It came to a point where I lost interest in it all....

_____________

* Not to be confused with the Summer of Sam.

Is the Trump Derangement Syndrome fever breaking?

That the president of the United States owes his office to Russian help is not a theory. It's a matter of record. What we're waiting for Mueller to clarify is how much the president and his team knew about that Russian help before it was delivered. https://t.co/oGR2wvRkDd

— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 23, 2019

"His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has or whatever DNA he has."

Said Barbra Streisand, about Michael Jackson, when she was asked about the new documentary "Leaving Neverland" (Variety).

“You can say ‘molested,’ but those children, as you heard them say [later, as adults], they were thrilled to be there. They both married and they both have children, so it didn’t kill them.”

When asked if she’s angry with Jackson, she replies, “It’s a combination of feelings. I feel bad for the children. I feel bad for him. I blame, I guess, the parents, who would allow their children to sleep with him. Why would Michael need these little children dressed like him and in the shows and the dancing and the hats?”

She's getting a lot of criticism for that. I'm seeing (on Twitter) that people are saying she's defending pedophilia. She's at least empathizing with the predicament of the pedophile.

She also said something negative about #MeToo: "Unfortunately, it’s going to cause a lot of women not being hired because men are worried they’ll be attacked." There, she's empathizing with the right side, the women, but she's empathizing for the wrong reason.

Streisand hates Trump and she's pushing her new album "Walls" (get it?). She seems to be one of those people who feel sure they're on the right side and there's a danger to that. Confident in your goodness, you can get too comfortable displaying your empathy. You can make mistakes. It can be amusing to laugh at such people when they trip up. But I feel bad for her. Her needs are her needs, coming from whatever childhood she had or whatever DNA she has.

"The Islamic State’s so-called caliphate has been defeated, a U.S.-backed force said Saturday..."

WaPo reports in "The Islamic State’s caliphate has been defeated, U.S.-backed forces say."

I celebrate this victory, but please forgive me if I look immediately turn to WaPo's treatment of President Trump. The first mention of him is in paragraph 4, and it's negative:

The militants switched gears as territorial defeat loomed, seeding sleeper cells across former strongholds as they prepared a new phase of insurgency. U.S. military officials have also warned that President Trump’s planned troop withdrawal — the shape of which remains unclear — has the potential to create a security vacuum within which the Islamic State could regroup.

Next we see that the dramatic success of the "caliphate" occurred under Obama:

The U.S.-led military campaign began in September 2014 after the Islamist militants rampaged through Iraq, seizing a third of its territory in the space of a week. They described the land that they seized as an Islamic State, and it often bore the hallmarks of a real one. Bureaucrats dealt with household bills and garbage collection. The group even minted its own coins.

Notice that Obama is not mentioned. But the next sentence refers to the current president and just calls him "the president," which I found disorienting because I saw "2014" and thought about Obama:

For the president, victory against the Islamic State marks the fulfillment of a campaign promise and as the battle ground toward its conclusion, Trump had repeatedly declared the group defeated.

So the horrible events that happened under Obama's watch are never tied to his name, and then Trump is not named next to the word "victory" — "For the president, victory" — but he is named later in the sentence where it's more negative — Trump "repeatedly declared" something that sounds wrong, that the group was "defeated" when that didn't happen until just now.

"Maybe the real Mueller report was the friends we made along the way."

Wrote Hunter, in last night's café.

This might be my #1 favorite comment ever.

ADDED: I think Hunter was repeating something that was already out there on the web. Not sure who said it first.

At the Friday Night Cafe...

... you can talk about anything.

"Mueller Delivers Report on Russia Investigation to Attorney General."

The NYT reports.

We're not reading it yet, but waiting for Barr.

Mr. Barr will decide how much of the report to share with Congress and, by extension, the American public. The House voted unanimously in March on a nonbinding resolution to make public the report’s findings, an indication of the deep support within both parties to air whatever evidence prosecutors uncovered.

ADDED: From WaPo:

The attorney general told [the House and Senate Judiciary Committee's] he was “reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend.”

The attorney general wrote he would consult with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and Mueller “to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Department’s long-standing practices and policies.”

Barr said there were no instances in the course of the investigation in which any of Mueller’s decisions were vetoed by his superiors at the Justice Department.

Oh, come on, don't go crazy. If you love "normal," as you say, you'd better observe the "served"/"fed" distinction.

I'm reading "Why are 2020 Democrats so weird?" by Michael Walther (in The Week). There's this:

Meanwhile, there is Beto. I don't particularly care that in 1988 the young Robert Francis O'Rourke posted some erotic verses about cows ("Oh, Milky wonder, sing for us once more, / Live your life, everlusting [sic] joy" is one of the only bits I can quote on this family website) online. I didn't even know until yesterday that there was such a thing as "online" in 1988. Nor am I going to get all worked up about his weird murder spree fantasy story, which is the kind of thing stupid teenagers write every day. But what I do want to know is whether he actually took a handful of green feces, put it in a bowl, and served it to his wife once, telling her that it was avocado. Asked by a journalist recently to confirm the anecdote, which had been reported by a supposed friend of the candidate, he responded that while he didn't remember this happening it "sounds like the kind of thing I would do." Come again? If you fed excrement to the mother of your children, I feel like you would recall. I almost certainly think she would. If there was ever something to lie about as a politician, this is it....

I can't be the only person who sometimes thinks there's something to be said for, you know, normal people in politics. It is certainly difficult to imagine poor Jeb Bush ever inviting his late beloved mother to view a smut film with at the local cinema in Kennebunkport. It is even harder to imagine President Obama feeding the former first lady the contents of one of Sasha or Malia's diapers.

"Served" means he put the bowl of green shit on the table in front of his wife and declared it to be avocado. Very funny. "Fed" means he got it on a spoon and aimed it at her mouth and even got it in. Tricking her. That's horrible. Big difference. I like normal people, and in my book, normal people get the difference between those 2 images and don't smear them together to try to make the world seem weirder than it is. It's weird enough. Let's be precise and honest about just how weird it is, because it could be a LOT weirder, and we need to hang onto the last remaining lumps of normal.

"Pantera's Far Beyond Driven turns 25."

My son John observes the occasion.

"She bristles at the notion that Students for Fair Admissions represents Asian Americans."

"[Edward] Blum, the group’s founder, had previously challenged affirmative action at the University of Texas. For that case, he recruited a white female plaintiff who said she was rejected from UT because of her race. When that suit failed, Blum tried again, this time arguing race-conscious admissions policies penalize Asian Americans.... He found support for his crusade among well-educated and wealthy Chinese Americans in places like Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay area, people who had grown suspicious when their high-achieving children were rejected from top-flight schools. They spread the word of their fight through WeChat, a Chinese messaging program. In Lee’s eyes, it is Students for Fair Admissions, not Harvard, that doesn’t recognize socioeconomic diversity among Asians. 'It’s very specific groups filing this lawsuit, and yet we’re all being clumped together,' she said. She is skeptical that eliminating race from college admissions decisions will benefit Hmong students, young people who, like her, grew up poor and in households where no English was spoken. 'It will definitely hurt them,' she predicted."

From "The Forgotten Minorities of Higher Education/What affirmative action means for low-income Asians" in The Washington Post Magazine.

But if using race as a factor were forbidden, I think schools would pay more attention to "young people who... grew up poor and in households where no English was spoken." So why shouldn't those who champion the interests of less well-off Asian groups support the lawsuit? I see that there's an estimate that 43% of Harvard students (instead of 23%) would be Asian if only GPA and test scores were used. Maybe the idea is that if there were a higher proportion of Asian students, the Asian students attempting to rely on low economic status would be discriminated against, because the schools would be afraid of looking too Asian. Asian, as the article points out, is a very large category, comprising many subgroups, but if school are concerned about looks, the question is whether these subgroups are visually distinguishable to... who?... white Americans. And that's the problem with using economic deprivation (rather than race) as a factor: It's doesn't show. Not vividly anyway.

"As a man charged with publicly explaining Donald Trump’s often meandering and colloquial vernacular in highly adversarial TV settings..."

"... I appreciate more than most the sometimes-murky nature of his off-script commentaries. But these Charlottesville statements leave little room for interpretation. For any honest person, therefore, to conclude that the president somehow praised the very people he actually derided, reveals a blatant and blinding level of bias. Nonetheless, countless so-called journalists have furthered this damnable lie. For example, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace responded that Trump had 'given safe harbor to Nazis, to white supremacists.' Her NBC colleague Chuck Todd claimed Trump 'gave me the wrong kind of chills. Honestly, I’m a bit shaken from what I just heard.' Not to be outdone, print also got in on the act, with the New York Times spewing the blatantly propagandist headline: 'Trump Gives White Supremacists Unequivocal Boost.' How could the Times possibly reconcile that Trump, who admonished that the supremacists should be 'condemned totally' somehow also delivered an 'unequivocal boost' to those very same miscreants?... Despite the clear evidence of Trump’s statements regarding Charlottesville, major media figures insist on spreading the calumny that Trump called neo-Nazis 'fine people.' The only explanation for such a repeated falsehood is abject laziness or willful deception."

Writes Steve Cortes,  a CNN political commentator.

I suspect that they keep repeating the falsehood because they are so clearly wrong that they can't find any way to back down. And I also think they've seen the effectiveness of this attack on Trump. It has worked as propaganda, so why stop now? The hit to their credibility has already occurred, so why not keep manipulating minds?

"Did Stefon write this headline?"

Did Stefon write this headline? https://t.co/XCstrhuUzD

— Chasten Buttigieg (@Chas10Buttigieg) March 21, 2019

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, is running for President. Chasten Buttigieg, who has a good Twitter presence, is his husband. Stefon is this "Saturday Night Live" character.

Chris Cillizza is a CNN political analyst, whose latest piece, linked in that tweet, reads:

Don't look now, but a(nother) skinny kid with a funny name is turning heads in the presidential race.

In 2008, it was Barack Obama. In 2020, it's Pete Buttigieg.

Buttigieg, the 37-year-old, married gay mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is, at the moment, the hottest candidate in the Democratic presidential field -- drawing rave reviews everywhere he goes.... He's young, charismatic and personable. He knows how to talk like a regular person -- an underrated trait in a field filled with front-running senators. And he has a remarkable resume: Rhodes scholar, military veteran, gay mayor of his hometown....

But Buttigieg is unquestionably having a moment right now....

"A judge has issued a temporary injunction blocking Wisconsin Republicans’ contentious lame-duck laws limiting the powers of Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul, both Democrats."

WKOW reports.

Republicans passed the lame-duck laws during an all-night extraordinary session in December just weeks before Evers and Kaul took office. An extraordinary session is a previously unscheduled floor period initiated by majority party leaders.

A coalition of liberal-leaning groups filed a lawsuit in January arguing such sessions are illegal. They contend the Wisconsin Constitution allows legislators to convene only at such times as set out in a law passed at the beginning of each two-year session or at the governor’s call....

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said, “For decades the Legislature has used extraordinary sessions that have been widely supported by members of both parties. The most recent extraordinary session was held for Governor Evers’ Budget Address..... Today’s ruling only creates chaos and will surely raise questions about items passed during previous extraordinary sessions, including stronger laws against child sexual predators and drunk drivers. We will appeal this ruling.”

"The only thing easier than beating the Klan in court... was raising money off Klan-fighting from liberals up north

"... who still had fresh visions of the violent confrontations of the sixties in their heads. The S.P.L.C. got a huge publicity boost in July, 1983, when three Klansmen firebombed its headquarters. A melted clock from the burned-down building, stuck at 3:47 a.m., is featured in the main lobby of the Montgomery office today. In 1987, the center won a landmark seven-million-dollar damage judgment against the Klan; a decade later, in 1998, it scored a thirty-eight-million-dollar judgment against Klansmen who burned down a black church in South Carolina. With those victories, Dees claimed the right to boast into perpetuity that the S.P.L.C. had effectively 'shut down' the K.K.K. By the time I touched down in Montgomery [in 2001], the center had increased its staff and branched out considerably—adding an educational component called Teaching Tolerance and expanding its legal and intelligence operations to target a broad range of right-wing groups and injustices—but the basic formula perfected in the eighties remained the same. The annual hate-group list, which in 2018 included a thousand and twenty organizations, both small and large, remains a valuable resource for journalists and a masterstroke of Dees’s marketing talents; every year, when the center publishes it, mainstream outlets write about the 'rising tide of hate' discovered by the S.P.L.C.’s researchers, and reporters frequently refer to the list when they write about the groups. As critics have long pointed out, however, the hate-group designations also drive attention to the extremists. Many groups, including the religious-right Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, raise considerable money by decrying the S.P.L.C.’s 'attacks.'"

From "The Reckoning of Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center" by Bob Moser in The New Yorker.