Today's Trumpian tale of two tabloids

 By Hal Brown

Someone walking by news kiosks in New York today might mistake the cover page (below) for the Murdoch owned New York Post for it's competitor, the liberal Daily News:

I found out where the Post got the photo of Trump holding a bat (here). It was taken while was participating in a Made in America event with companies featuring their products in the Blue Room of the White House in July, 2017.

Both covers featured the embattled former president but the Post says he's deranged and "bat hit crazy" while the New York Daily News "merely" says he's dangerous. 

I would like to have been in the Post newsroom to see if anyone brought up the idea of spelling out the word "shit" thus making the cover look something like this and hear the pro and con arguments.

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The Daily News has a self-satisfied slightly sneering Trump on their cover today. They are known for their Trump covers which are far harsher:

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I don't know what to call the facial expression on the baseball bat holding Trump.

Here's the featured NY Post editorial.

I won't summarize the article (click above to read it) but will note it has one choice reference that anti-Trumpers have been using for years, saying that the emperor has no clothes (left).

Update Sat, afternoon: In Raw Story today Tom Boggioni highlighted the same reference here:

I note that there are two meanings of the word "won't" shown in the NY Post title but not in the article itself. "Won't" can mean a prediction about something that won't occur in the future. Alternately, it can be a word suggesting in this context that Trump can decide whether to change or not. Defining it this way misses the fact that Trump, being Trump, can't change.

Another way to put this is that Trump won't change because he can't change.

No matter how self-defeating, acting on his impulses to lash out at those he is fighting with words that go beyond intemperate to insane he is unable to control himself. 

Rather than rant and rave out loud or stew in his boiling juices in silent rage like a more-or-less normal person who feels their world crashing down around them, he vents his spleen though his fingertips when he types (now often in all caps) on Truth Social. 

Wait for Waco today when we'll see video clips of his doing it with his maniac mouth. (More on Waco rally.)

Who would have predicted that the liberal media and the right-wing media would both use words like crazy, deranged and unhinged to describe Donald Trump? For example, this is how HUFFPOST titled their article about the Post editorial today: 

‘Unhinged’: Trump Ripped In Withering Editorial From Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post

The previously pro-Trump tabloid offered some harsh truths for Trump supporters.

Considering that nothing makes it into a Rupert Murdoch owned publication as an editorial about Trump, whether it's The NY Post or The Wall Street Journal, that doesn't have the bosses approval. Fox News, which has far more influence with Republican voters than Murdoch's American newspapers, doesn't air editorials, at least not the way newspapers regularly do.

Now it is a wait and see game to see whether Murdoch forces the likes of Tucker Carlson so be ordered to throw Trump out the window or be defenestrated themselves.

You read it here.

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In death at 92 Portland's iconic drag queen Darcelle XV gets headline coverage in local news. Take that anti-woke warriors..

 By Hal Brown

If you aren't familiar with Portland, Oregon and its LGBTQ+ scene you may not know who Darcelle XV is so you may want to look at Wikipedia here.

CC 2.0 on Wikipedia

I am often overwhelmed and always dismayed by the news about the anti-woke warriors like Ron DeSantis who thinks drag represents a toxin riskier than ricin, the book burners, and people like this.

Click above to read article

These feelings are mitigated at times when I realize that there are really good people holding the line against the anti-woke mob. I am hopeful when I read an article like this, coincidentally published in Salon today: 

The GOP is becoming more unhinged about LGBTQ people — which will only make them more unpopular

New research shows most Americans side with RuPaul and Kevin Bacon against Christian nationalists

While Portland's Darcelle XV dying isn't a call for celebration, living a full and fulfilling life until the age of 92 is.

This was in my email last night:

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I looked at the local TV news websites this morning and noted that this story was the top story on two of the three of them. One was KATU, a station owned by the far-right Sinclair corporation.

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This is what KGW looked like:

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This a morning it wasn't the lead on KOIN online but it might have been when it was posted late last night:

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This is a Google News search for Darcelle XV:

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Before yesterday Darcelle XV was featured in these articles:

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Here's the Gigantic Brewing story:

Click link for story, click above to enlarge image.

All of this news coverage highlights the fact that here in progressive Portland by far the majority of us, including those in our newsrooms, are woke. Whether we are a member of the LGBTQ+ community or not we are proud to be wonderfully woke.

I feel for progressive in red states and experience a weird tinge of something akin to guilt, but not really guilt, that I live where I do. I have friends in Florida who moved there decades ago never anticipating what it would become, and like many in similar situations there and in other irredeemably red states, can't relocate to a blue state.

Addendum:

Click above to read article

Trump and DeSantis are no P.T. Barnums but they do play people for suckers

 By Hal Brown

Click above to enlarge image

Link to article in The Independent | HUFFPOST article

With American democracy at stake in the 2024 election the kind of silliness shown above would be a mere sideshow one wouldn't really mind missing if you came late for actual circus. 

Some of my fond childhood memories are of my parents taking my sister and me to the the amazing Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus at Madison Square Garden include not only watching the great clown Emmett Kelly, the trapeze artists, the elephant parade, and lion and tiger tamers but also going to the basement to see the sideshow attractions. I remember my parents paid a quarter for the giant to hand me one on his enormous rings.

This being said, it is hard not to be intrigued by Trump's juvenile but successful obsession with calling his adversaries silly names. However, is Trump the 21st century political P.T. Barnum?

Most people, myself included, didn't know that the man frequently quoted as saying that there's a sucker born every minute (no proof he really said this) was also a politician.

Barnum served two terms in the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as a Republican. He was also the mayor of Bridgeport. (More on his life in politics.)

Even though he switched parties from Democratic to Republican he'd be considered a liberal Democrat today:

Barnum was significantly involved in politics. He mainly focused on race, slavery, and sectionalism in the period leading up to the American Civil War. He opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which supported slavery, so he left the Democratic Party which endorsed slavery and became part of the new anti-slavery Republican Party.

As a showman he was known for perpetrating hoaxes:

In 1842 Barnum introduced his first major hoax: a creature with the body of a monkey and the tail of a fish known as the "Feejee" mermaid. He leased it from fellow museum owner Moses Kimball of Boston who became his friend, confidant, and collaborator. Barnum justified his hoaxes by saying that they were advertisements to draw attention to the museum. "I don't believe in duping the public", he said, "but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them."

If you want to call him a liar rather than a hoaxer one could compare him to Trump and DeSantis. Barnum would certainly make a better president than either of these two.

Nixon was brought down by tapes. It could happen to Trump

 By Hal Brown

The original Nixon White House tape recorder is shown in an undated handout photo. (National Archives via AP)

One word stood out in this Salon article:

Judge orders Trump lawyer to reveal evidence in “criminal scheme” — and there may be tapes: report

Judge rules Trump duped his own lawyers in Mar-a-Lago case, orders attorney to testify and turn over transcriptions

Howell also ordered Corcoran to turn over records related to what she described as Trump's alleged "criminal scheme," according to the report. The report also revealed that Corcoran may have recorded his discussions with Trump, noting that the records include "handwritten notes, invoices and transcriptions of personal audio recordings."

Corcoran is the Trump lawyer that has been order to testify and turn over documents.

Here's more from Salon:

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman said the evidence "could be absolutely dynamite."

"It appears that Corcoran took notes & maybe RECORDED Trump, his client (sense a pattern of mistrust by Trump lawyers?)," Litman tweeted. "If doc or taped evid shows Trump knows the subpoena is false, that is killer."

Note that the word "recorded" is in all caps.

Here's another article:

Prosecutors have said they have reason to believe efforts were made to "obstruct" their investigation. 

They want to ask Corcoran about an alleged call he had with Trump on June 24, 2022, around the time investigators were seeking to secure documents at Trump's home and video surveillance tapes of Mar-a-Lago, CBS News reported.

"Those could be very incriminating phone calls by themselves," Cunningham said. "If that material is handed over, that could be by itself enough to indict [Trump], quite possibly enough to send him to prison."

The word recorded and references to recordings immediately brought to mind the Nixon Oval Office tapes.

Hopefully everyone reading this is old enough to remember what they were or familiar with the history of Watergate. 

The release of the tape, 18 minute gap notwithstanding, led to this:

and eventually to this:

There was one recording of Trump that we know of that could have prevented him from becoming president in the first place. I don't need to reference it because I am not sure how many asterisks I should use in the word that showed how he objectified women. 

Of course nobody uses tapes these digital days, but you get the idea. It is possible that the recording from attorney Corcoran added to the recording Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (which you can lister to here) is a different case end up leading to the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.

One thing is for certain, if he goes down and ends up being given jail time, he won't be leaving Mar-a-Lago on a Marine helicopter (designated as Marine One if the president is onboard). 

Venomous GOP House committee chair was just amazingly honest

 By Hal Brown

Update, new article in Salon blasts NY Times writers: N.Y. Times offers grotesque whitewash of Rep. James Comer, GOP's new attack dog

Lengthy profile of Oversight Committee chair James Comer is loaded with folksy details — but misses the real story

-------------------

There is a short Salon article by Amanda Marcotte. In it she refers to James Comer, the Kentucky member of the House, as the "newly crowned chair of the House Oversight Committee" hence my illustration above.

.

The first half of the article before Marcotte went into what is in the title struck me as amazing because it describes the candor and forthrightness of a Republican who is only recently in the public eye, or at least in the eyes of people who follow politics closely.

"You know, the customer's always right."

Rep. James Comer gave this juicy quote to Jonathan Swan and Luke Broadwater for their New York Times profile of the Kentucky Republican. He was explaining his affection for right-wing conspiracy theories. The "customer[s]" in this case, as Swan and Broadwater write, are the "vengeful, hard-right voters" who "propelled Comer to stardom" in the GOP.

It's quite an admission from the newly crowned chair of the House Oversight Committee. When asked why he is so intent on using his powers, as Swan and Broadwater write, "to investigate unhinged claims about President Biden and Democrats," Comer could have played political word games, pretending either to take these conspiracy theories more seriously than he actually does. He could have feigned outrage at the suggestion that his motives are anything less than honorable. Instead, Comer seems unconcerned to be seen, to the readers of the New York Times anyway, as a huckster for disinformation scraped out of the darkest corners of the internet.

"They don't know that it's QAnon," he even told Swan and Broadwater, "but it's QAnon stuff."

Former senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer tweeted that “Jim Comer has a Trumpian blend of incompetence and malice”. Comer is described as the an "aggressive promoter of sinister-sounding claims about the president and his family" in The New York Times. The Times also says he "has gone from being a favorite Republican among Democrats in Kentucky’s Legislature to a commander of the G.O.P. war machine in Congress."

Credit...This is from the Times article:

Appearing on Fox News in January, Mr. Comer implied, without evidence, that there was a connection between Mr. Biden improperly holding on to classified documents when he was a private citizen and his son, Hunter, receiving a diamond from a Chinese tycoon. In another segment Mr. Comer lamented that Beau Biden, the president’s other son, who died of cancer in 2015, was never investigated.

His embrace of such statements reflects how Mr. Comer, who voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory and was a favorite among Democrats in Kentucky’s Legislature, has transformed himself to command the Republican war machine in Congress — becoming a high-profile example of what it takes to rise and thrive in the Fox News-fed MAGA universe.

It also underscores the cutthroat instincts of Mr. Comer, who presents himself as an affable country boy of limited abilities, but who has proved to be a methodical and transactional political operator, willing to go to great lengths to crush his adversaries.

During his campaign for governor in 2015, facing allegations of abuse from an ex-girlfriend who also said he had taken her to get an abortion, Mr. Comer worked to discredit a blogger reporting on the claims and a campaign rival he believed was behind them, leaking private emails between the two. Mr. Comer denied the woman’s charges but lost the race anyway.

The honesty shown in the interview with Swan and Broadwater is surprising, but it also may be an example of his incompetence. Why would he want to put it out there that he is deliberately manipulating people who voted him into office with lies? Whoever runs against him in the future would be stupid if they didn't use this against him.

What are we to make about how honest he was with Jonathan Karl and Luke Broadwater interviewing him for a newspaper he'd probably refer to as a purveyor of fake news? Does he assume that none of the Kentuckians who elected him four times to represent them will ever read it? After all he basically just called them ignoramuses.