Tag NPR

…and hope never to see again

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

I saw the worst show on TV tonight…but couldn’t turn away.  Someone suggested taking a drink every time the lead character said “like no one’s ever seen before” and it just got harder and harder to work the remote control.  Almost as bad as when you had to take a shot each time a character on The Bob Newhart Show said “Hi, Bob.”  (Oh, college days.)

Did our president really just say that military recruiting offices “are having among the best recruiting results ever in the history of our services”?  (What about the days after Pearl Harbor?)  Or that we will get Greenland “one way or the other, we’re going to get it”?  In what race can one break the old record time by five hours?  He did say DOGE is “headed by Elon Musk,” directly contradicting his own staff’s efforts to convince a judge that someone else is really in charge.

If you enjoy a good fact-checking of TFG – and who doesn’t – here (in no particular order) are a few from which you can choose.  (Sorry, couldn’t find the one from Fox News…you know, where they used to promise to report so we could decide.)

NPRWashington Post
New York TimesCBS
MSNBCPolitiFact
CNNABC

Also:

  • Isn’t he just the worst public speaker, in the sense of classic oratory?  For all his criticism of others being tied to the teleprompter, he’d have been totally lost if that thing had died…never even opened the binder in front of him.  He can read OK, but he conveys no sense of what the words really mean.
  • Why did we even have this speech anyway?  It was not a State of the Union speech, even if he seemed to think it was.  I guess his ego is as fragile as they say for such a self-gratifying performance piece to be required.
  • Good for you, Al Green (my own representative in Congress)…I couldn’t hear what you were saying, but it was good to see someone literally standing up to this doofus.

As the coach used to say each Monday, let’s talk a bit about the happenings of last week

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… (Been done.)

It was the worst night of my entire life… (Take it easy, Princess.)

What in the actual f**k were you people thinking… (Leave that approach to Jon Stewart.  How about this:)

I am very disappointed with the result of the presidential election, and I’m concerned about what’s going to happen starting next year.  (OK…keep going.)

It’s not that I was firmly convinced that Kamala Harris was going to win and am now staring at the returns in disbelief.  I definitely wanted her to win, but wasn’t deluded into thinking there was only one possible outcome.  I am bewildered to think that more than 73 million Americans think the former guy – now the once and future guy, I guess? – is the best person for the job.  Unless they really don’t think that at all.

Now I’m reading (see the reading list below, and thanks to everyone who kept this such a secret until after the whole thing was over) that Trump, as opposed to Harris or Joe Biden or apparently any other Republican, represents a dramatic change from a system that these people do not trust.  Strenuously do not trust.  The theory is that Trump voters don’t really agree with everything that comes out of his mouth; some things, sure, but not everything.  But they do want a major change from the status quo.  They want to throw out the scoundrels of the political establishment, and they trust that anything is better than what we have right now.  Even crazy, lying, fascist Trump is, they think, preferable to more of the same old same old.

While recognizing that all of us only have two real choices in this race by the time we get to November, I’m still surprised that so many people would vote for Trump.  A guy who lies to us so profoundly and so often, who is a convicted criminal, who has shamelessly used public office to enrich himself; who offers a plan to fight inflation and lower prices with tariffs that will undoubtedly raise prices instead, who promises to deport tens of millions of people in a plan that will be enormously expensive and disruptive to the labor force and economy as well as probably inhumane, who promises the unattainable instantly (end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza?  Easy peasy) with no clear plan of action.  Or any plan at all.

I’m worried about what’s going to happen next.  We were surprised in 2017 when he didn’t become more presidential or tone down the rhetoric or act more like what we were used to, but this time no one should be surprised if he does some of the out-there things he promised to do.

–he promised massive tariffs on foreign goods; we’ll all pay higher prices for those goods because the higher prices will be passed along to us by the seller.

–he promised (allegedly) vaccine denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. control of our public health agencies; yeah, what could go wrong there.

–he promised to jail his critics; First Amendment, Schmirst Amendment.  Stand by for other protected rights to be ignored.

–he promised the largest mass deportation in American history; waiting now for the (multi-million dollar) plans to construct a new generation of internment camps while he strong-arms our allies to accept repatriation.

–he promised to settle the wars in Gaza and Ukraine; stand by for “America First” plans that will provoke Iran, threaten Ukraine’s sovereignty (to the benefit of Russia), and put the NATO alliance in jeopardy.

You get the picture.  If Republicans end up with control of the House of Representatives as well as the Senate, we’ll also see Trump’s sudden support for Project 2025 and any other effort to push the Christian nationalist agenda to remake America civil society in their image.  And he’ll do it all while, as he did the first time, illegally enriching himself (hello, Emoluments Clause, my old friend).

Oh yeah, there’s this result, too:

image

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

To those thinking, how could Trump possibly win – that’s not who we are: Michelle Goldberg makes the case that maybe it is:

“Trump’s first election felt like a fluke, a sick accident enabled by Democratic complacency. But this year, the forces of liberal pluralism and basic civic decency poured everything they could into the fight, and they lost not just the Electoral College but also quite likely the popular vote. The American electorate, knowing exactly who Trump is, chose him. This is, it turns out, who we are.”

The polls say Trump won big with male voters; Elizabeth Spiers explores just which men they mean: Trump’s appeal to men was

“a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright. That this appealed in particular to white men was not a coincidence — it intersects with other types of entitlement, including the idea that white people are superior to other races and more qualified to hold positions of power, and that any success that women and minorities have has been unfairly conferred to them by D.E.I. programs, affirmative action and government set-asides. For men unhappy with their status, this view offers a group of people to blame, which feels more tangible than blaming systemic problems like rising economic inequality and the difficulty of adapting to technological and cultural changes.”

Bernie Sanders’ take:

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them…First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

David French calls the vote a revolt against the ruling class and a faithful effort by those who believe Trump fulfills a prophecy.  (Honest to God)

Democratic mega-donor (and one-time candidate himself) Michael Bloomberg wonders how Democrats could possibly lose to such a bad candidate.

Just for fun, here’s a “deep dive” (as the kids say) on the scary details of Project 2025; Christian nationalists are unlikely to let this opportunity pass.

A little something from me for the holiday

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It’s as predictable as the local TV Breaking News!  alert about an apartment fire that was put out hours ago: reporters are about to tell us that Labor Day is the traditional start of the presidential campaign season.  Oh yeah?  And all that “presidential campaigning” and adjacent nonsense I’ve been so unsuccessful in avoiding for the last 20 months, what was that – a fever dream?  I wish this was just the start, but mostly I wish it was the end.

The Founding Fathers were pretty smart guys, and I don’t think they set presidential elections four years apart so we could spend half or more of the time in between laser-focused on the next election.  There is nothing I can think of that is more non-productive, unless you are one of those people who make their living from the political-industrial complex.  We can’t (probably shouldn’t) make it against the law to campaign non-stop if you wish to, but we don’t have to encourage it the way we do.  And by “we,” I mean American journalism.

I understand why the national media has to cover the campaign every day: in case something newsworthy happens.  Something actually “new,” or something tragic, or yes, even something weird.  But when Kamala Harris again expresses her joy as she seems to do most days, or Donald Trump again tells the same lies he tells every day, I can do without you – every day – trying to make it seem like that’s the most important thing that happened.  You have to have someone there every day, just in case, but you don’t have to tell me about it every day even when the story doesn’t change.

This is especially applicable to all-news television (and radio), broadcast and cable, which has tons and tons of space to fill and only just so much news every day with which to fill it.  (This I know from experience, having been an editor and newscaster at Houston’s top-rated news/talk radio station when it changed to all-news: it didn’t take even an hour before we were repeating ourselves, and then repeating the repeats.  Within a few years, the talk shows were back.)  Opening up a live camera at some event and then just letting it run is an efficient way to fill time (or is it kill time?), but a lazy way to do it and an ineffective way to inform people about what’s really going on.  (See: CNN at every Trump rally in 2015 and 2016.)

And please, when you do a story on the campaign, make an effort to try to put things in perspective, and stop being so damn petrified by the threat that “someone” will say you’re biased; just answer the accusation plainly and directly.  For instance:

“No, we are not biased against the former president and his campaign.  We are reporting facts and providing context for our readers, listeners and viewers so they can clearly understand what happened Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, including (1) the irony of the man who called American soldiers and sailors who gave their lives for their country “suckers” and “losers” because “there was nothing in it for them” now using the nation’s largest veterans cemetery as a prop for a campaign ad, in violation of service regulations/federal law (not to mention good taste and good manners), and (2) the chutzpah of the whole Trump campaign, which (a) ignored the law against political use of the grounds, (b) when confronted with the violation, slandered the person who had the temerity to do her job by saying that “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” [emphasis added] and (c) then posted the video anyway.”  [I’m not linking to the TikTok video, but it’s easy to find.]  “We understand that in some cases, a presentation of the facts and the context can seem biased against the subject of a story; our stories are not meant to be puff pieces on behalf of anyone.”

And when it comes to reporting on TFG, allow me to pass along these suggestions from a New York Times review of campaign rhetoric during just one week earlier this year.  I think we all know by now that Trump lies.  A lot.  More than 30,000 times just during his presidency, the Washington Post calculated, about 21 times per day on average.  And that doesn’t include his golf scores.  The Times analysis of the deluge of deceit, the overflow of fibbery, the mountain of misrepresentation, found that “Though his penchant for bending the truth, sometimes to the breaking point, has been well documented, a close study of how he does so reveals a kind of technique to his dishonesty: a set of recurring rhetorical moves with which Mr. Trump fuels his popularity among his supporters.”  “His words focused heavily on attacking his political rivals, self-aggrandizing and stoking fear to make his case for 2024. In doing so, Mr. Trump often relied on repeated falsehoods and half-truths. He has yet to deviate from this approach in the general election.”  Check it out.

I also recommend checking out Eugene Robinson’s column in the Washington Post for getting into the details about the “dishonorable” actions of the former president at Arlington this week:

Just because we are accustomed to this kind of behavior from Trump does not mean we should accept it. Just because he has no sense of honor or appreciation of sacrifice does not mean we have to pretend honor and sacrifice no longer exist. Just because “Trump is an awful person” is an old story does not mean we should yawn at this latest demonstration and quickly move on.

(snip)

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” Arlington Cemetery officials said this week in a statement. This was made clear to Trump’s team as the visit was being planned, officials said — including the strict enforcement of the rule at Section 60, where grief and loss are still raw.

“What was abundantly clear-cut was: Section 60, no photos and no video,” a defense official told The Post.

(snip)

No one can dismiss the incident as a misunderstanding by Trump and his aides, since their official position is that Trump is infallible. The campaign’s response, as usual, was a lie — a false and gratuitously cruel statement from spokesman Steven Cheung…

(snip)

Arlington National Cemetery is a place of honor. Donald Trump thinks honor is for suckers and losers — and values sacrifice only if it might help him win an election. Do not become numb to his nature.

Don’t let the bully win

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

If you’ve been having trouble believing that Vladimir Putin is an unhinged, authoritarian war criminal, I’d suggest you take a few minutes to check out this report from last week’s “60 Minutes” to learn more about the conditions in Ukraine today.  It’s a story about how the people of that country are dealing with Russia’s on-going assault on civilian targets: apartment buildings and schools, power plants and utility infrastructure, and the non-combatants who are suffering as “collateral damage” from attacks that violate global rules on the ethical conduct of war.  (Yeah, there are such things; crazy.)

They are heroic.  Inspiring.  To watch what they have to put up with – conditions they do not deserve, that they suffer as a result of an unprovoked invasion of their sovereign country – made me cry.  Made me wonder, what can we do about this?

The “we” in this case is the rest of the world, everybody outside of Putin’s borders.  The people who just assumed, one year ago when Russia illegally invaded its neighbor, that the global condemnation of this blatant aggression would lead in short order to a low-key pullback by Russian forces with attendant harrumphing about maintaining what he claims as the historical Russian Empire, and then some international back-and-forthing as this big thing faded into the background…so we could maintain our comfort level about life in general and go on to the next big thing.

(People inside of Putin’s borders, we could use your help, too.)

But that didn’t happen.  What I think those of us outside of the professionals in intelligence and diplomacy and history didn’t and maybe still don’t really understand, is that Putin is a criminal (no matter what George W. saw in his soul) and he doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks or says about how he treats his neighbors.  He hasn’t won easily on the battlefield as he assumed he would, so on top of taking Ukraine’s land and its children he is launching terrorist attacks on the people in the hope that they will lose their resilience and force their government to give up the fight.

I wish I could think of something more “we” could do that would help those people.  Congress should be commended for joining much of the rest of the western world in continuing to provide military assistance to Ukraine so it can keeping fighting the fight. I get it that, when dealing with someone who has become as isolated as Putin, there are risks to us if he decides our support of Ukraine needs to be challenged, but we can’t abandon these people.  They are the latest victims of a megalomaniacal bully, one who can no more be counted on to stop bullying today than could the chancellor of Germany in 1938.

Fundamental dishonesty

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

It wasn’t a “driveway moment” because I wasn’t in my driveway, I wasn’t sitting in the car listening to the radio to hear the end of a story that had sucked me in.  No, I was still on the road headed home from the grocery store when I heard two words that broke through and provided some clarity of mind, finally, amid the onslaught of distressing rulings from the Supreme Court of the United States.

Just a week ago, the court’s six “conservative” justices ruled that a program in Maine that subsidizes tuition for certain private schools in rural areas of the state cannot exclude religious private schools from the program.  Two days later the same six found that a New York law placing strict limits on carrying guns in public violates the Second Amendment.  And the day after that, those same six members not only found that a Mississippi ban on abortions after just 15 weeks was constitutional, they went the extra step and overturned the nearly 50-year old precedent of their own court that established a woman’s right to an abortion.

The separation of church and state.  The rights to privacy, and to safety, individual liberty, and self-determination.  The targets of this Supreme Court and the “conservative” movement in general couldn’t be clearer.  With each new Republican-appointed justice on the court, and each new ruling by the new majority, they demonstrate their mission to remake America as a paradigm of Christian nationalism.  It seems clear that the decades-long mission to destroy the secular society that has grown up since World War II just can’t be denied, not even when the inconvenience of the facts gets in the way.

It was Nina Totenberg on the radio reporting on the ruling in favor of the high school coach who insisted on holding a prayer circle at midfield after football games, and Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion scolded the school district:

“Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a personal religious observance, based on a mistaken view that it has a duty to suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination. Mr. Kennedy is entitled to summary judgment on his religious exercise and free speech claims,” Gorsuch wrote.

The three dissenters said that account of the facts blinkered reality (emphasis added). Writing for the three liberals, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that Kennedy’s prayer was neither private speech, nor benign. She pointed to the fact that the coach conducted a media blitz leading ultimately to the field being stormed and students being knocked down. And she said “schools face a higher risk of unconstitutionally ‘coerc[ing] … support or participat[ion] in religion or its exercise’ than other government entities.”

“This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our Nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state,” Sotomayor wrote. “Today’s decision elevates the rights of a school coach who voluntarily accepted public employment, over the rights of students required to attend public schools and who may feel obligated to join in prayer.” In doing so, Sotomayor claims, the court gives “short shrift” to the constitutions ban on state entanglement with religion.

University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock usually files briefs siding with religion advocates. But not in this case. He called Monday’s ruling, “fundamentally dishonest” and pointed to the third sentence of the Gorsuch opinion, which characterizes coach Kennedy’s conduct as “quiet isolated prayers,” stating, “They weren’t quiet and they weren’t isolated. They were leading the students in prayer, and to say that’s okay undermines all the school prayer cases.” By that he means Supreme Court decisions barring teacher- or student-led prayers in public school classrooms, and ceremonies like graduation.

It was like a fire alarm went off inside my head: “fundamentally dishonest.”

Yes—the fundamental dishonesty of these justices, and of the Christian religious extremists who have been fighting the secularization of American society for generations!  They have had a winking understanding with a certain segment of America: anything is permissible—the end justifies the means—when it comes to returning America to be the Christian country we all “know” it should be, including lying under oath in order to gain positions of power.  Don’t believe me?  Look at the video of the confirmation hearings over the years of the “conservative” justices now on the court: is it just a coincidence that when the Senate Judiciary Committees asked these nominees about Roe v. Wade, these individuals had the same answer, in virtually the same words, words meant to leave the impression that they believed in the doctrine of stare decisis in general and specifically for this case?  I think not.

In a concurring opinion on Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas says the quiet part out loud about using the wedge they perfected in overturning Roe to take aim at other precedents that guarantee other rights to Americans.

“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote on Page 119 of the opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, also referring to the rulings that legalized same-sex relationships and marriage equality, respectively. “Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous’ … we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents.”

Just coincidence, right, that the other cases on his mind are the ones that guaranteed the rights to same-sex marriage, and same-sex sex, and the use of birth control.  BIRTH CONTROL!?  He wants to return to a time when the use of birth control by married couples in the privacy of their own home could be and was prohibited by states?  Who can even imagine such a thing?

I know who…so do you.  And I don’t take any comfort—at all—in the protestation from the other five “conservative” justices that “[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”  When there is fundamental dishonesty, I have doubts.