Looks like we didn’t get one up, so here we go:
The Russians tried to re-create their Cold War propaganda machine on the internet this election season. A thing that helped to make “fake news” a thing. Since the US does not censor (mainly) the internet and since Americans still do not get how to vet their news, it seems like we were a sitting target. So now we have a ton of GOPers who think that the Russians are in the business of telling them something truthful about their own country. What a great irony — the group of people who used to be the most reliably fierce Cold Warriors are now being bamboozled by Russia. Because there is no way that the American liberal media could be as reliable as the Russian fake media.
Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery — including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human “trolls,” and networks of websites and social-media accounts — echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.
Don’t remember seeing this in an Open Thread (I’m still on vacation), but Jack Markell and Delaware got a plug in the NYT as a signal of hope for blue collar job creation and job training.
In the wake of the financial crisis, Delaware’s new governor, Jack Markell, and other officials did obvious things, like using stimulus money to stem the damage and even managing to reopen the refinery. But Markell, who’d run as an insurgent Democrat, understood that nostalgia alone wouldn’t help families pay their bills. So he began looking for ways both to save old jobs and to create new ones. His answer wasn’t original — but that’s O.K., because it was right.
In his almost eight years in office, he has made his No. 1 priority lifting the skills of Delaware’s citizens. He worked on traditional education, expanding high-quality pre-K and helping low-income teenagers go to college. And he worked on what academic researchers like Robert Schwartz call “the forgotten half”: the many students who won’t graduate from college but who also need strong skills to find decent jobs. Their struggles are a major reason that America’s work force is no longer considered the world’s most highly skilled.
It’s too early for a final verdict in the state, but the signs are encouraging. High school graduation rates have jumped. Educational attainment is above average — as are incomes. The jobless rate is 4.3 percent.
Fake news is now targeting Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X fame. Some of it specifically led by conservatives doing the bidding of Big Energy. But this is rich:
A similar website called Stop Elon From Failing Again lists its sponsor as a conservative advocacy group called Citizens for the Republic. Diana Banister, a PR executive who serves as CFTR’s executive director, says the site singles out Musk because “he is the epitome of a businessman who gets subsidy after subsidy he doesn’t need.” It’s impossible to tell who’s ultimately paying for CFTR’s campaign against Musk, as the organization is a so-called 501(c)(4) social welfare group, which under federal law doesn’t have to disclose its supporters. Banister says contributors to CFTR are “small donors, mostly” and “nothing competitive with” Musk. Asked whether oil companies antagonistic toward Tesla might be behind the website, Banister says: “We reached out to them [for donations], but they haven’t responded.”
Fun, right? A conservative who objects to a rich guy getting subsidies. But mostly, they object to a rich guy who is looking to disrupt industries that are long time government subsidy receivers without having to produce much for those subsidies.
Kevin Drum notes that Wall Street (specifically the financial markets) seem pretty happy that Clinton lost. No more pesky regulation, it looks like. The thing that confuses me is that so many “progressives” kept insisting that Hillary Clinton was the Wall St shill. Go figure.
Among the sharpest collapses is the link between financial stocks in the S&P 500 and the broader gauge….Shares of banks, asset managers and insurance companies as a group have jumped 11% since election day as investors bet on lighter regulation for the sector under the Trump administration. The financial sector’s performance trounced other groups, such as utilities and consumer staples, each of which are down more than 3%
The U.S. Media Is Completely Unprepared to Cover a Trump Presidency
This may be a repeat too. But I’m a press cynic — wide swaths of the mainstream media haven’t been prepared to cover much of anything from where I sit, except their own complaints of lack of press conferences.
The first reason is that political journalism is highly dependent on official sources, which are chased with abandon. Miller’s defense of stenography seems absurd in hindsight, but there is a grain of truth in it. Government sources are granted a high degree of credibility, and official lies can be difficult to dispute. Contrary leaks from highly placed sources can offer an important check on the official story, but the breadth of the surveillance state built by Bush and Obama, a surveillance state now in Trump’s hands, will make such leaks difficult.
For Trump administration mouthpieces, both public and anonymous, lies will now come with an officiality that will be difficult to contest. The total Republican control of government means that Democrats will struggle to get their objections to carry much weight, much as they did prior to the Iraq War.
Another obstacle is that media objectivity is not a fixed point. It is carefully calibrated to the perception of public opinion, because media organizations do not want to alienate their intended audience. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews offers a telling example of how media figures shift to identify with their perceived audience, which can ultimately mean cozying up to power. During George W. Bush’s absurd war pageantry in May 2003, Matthews remarked that Bush looked like a “high-flying jet star,” and that Bush “won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.” The Iraq War is arguably still ongoing.
The point about media objectivity here is an excellent one and one I hadn’t really thought through.
We Ain’t Gonna Play Trump City
No one goes. No athletes. No championship teams. No performers. No musicians. No celebrities. ALL invitations are rejected. No White House Correspondents Dinners. No Inauguration Balls. No State dinners. No singing Christmas carols with the Trump kids. Nothing. Full boycott. No exceptions. Donald Trump does not get to enjoy the perks of this job. Period.
For the rest of us: we don’t support anyone or any company that enabled Trump. Like those NBA teams, we boycott all Trump businesses. We turn off CNN. We don’t buy Ivanka’s bracelets. This amazing GrabYourWallet campaign will tell you how (@shannoncoulter). We don’t spend money to support the teams of his owners — we don’t buy their merchandise or tickets to their games. We leave their stadiums empty and we reject the advertisers who support them. And we turn away from anyone who violates this ban, no matter how much we might like their work. Any product, team or company associated with Trump is one that tacitly funds bigotry and intolerance.
We vote with our wallets.
I’m in.