the evidence is accumulating that Trump fired James Comey in the middle of an accelerating investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and then lied to the American people about the reason. No amount of Democratic hysteria can make that right. There is no amount of leftist hypocrisy that makes that acceptable.
.. To believe Trump’s story, you have to believe that he did a complete about-face, that he’s repudiated his previous praise and his previous critiques of Comey. For example, at a campaign rally on October 31, he said, “It took guts for director Comey to make the move that he made” to publicly announce that the FBI had reopened its e-mail investigation. Now that gutsy move is grounds for termination?
.. throughout, there was a consistent theme: Trump’s thoughts about Comey always directly reflected Trump’s political self-interest.
.. Lawyers are familiar with a term called “pretext.” Employment lawyers encounter it all the time. For example, if a boss wants to fire an employee because she’s black or Christian, they’ll rarely say: “I hate Christians. Pack your things.” Instead, they’ll look for another justification that masks the real motivation. “Jane was late Friday. She has to go. Jill didn’t fill out her TPS report correctly. Time to leave.”
.. Lawyers are familiar with a term called “pretext.” Employment lawyers encounter it all the time. For example, if a boss wants to fire an employee because she’s black or Christian, they’ll rarely say: “I hate Christians. Pack your things.” Instead, they’ll look for another justification that masks the real motivation. “Jane was late Friday. She has to go. Jill didn’t fill out her TPS report correctly. Time to leave.”
.. It’s time to stop enabling Trump and start seeking the truth — even if the truth hurts.
House Republicans Go Off the Cliff
The Republicans were given a gift by Trump’s campaign, a grace they did not merit: the gift of freedom from the trap of dogma, from the pre-existing condition of zombie Reaganism, from an agenda out of touch with the concerns of their actual constituents.
.. Were Trump actually governing along the populist lines he promised, the intra-Democratic debate over
- “identity politics versus
- class politics versus
- making it all about Trump (and Russia?)”
would be fraught and complicated, the best course of action murky.
.. the central Democratic argument in 2018 and 2020 should be entirely clear: Trump is not a populist but just another pro-plutocracy Republican, and everything his party promised you on health care was a sham.
s Health care is now set to be a defining issue in the next election cycles
Governors, gubernatorial candidates and state legislators, meanwhile, will be asked whether they intend to “opt out” of provisions in the Affordable Care Act that are overwhelmingly popular with voters, as is permitted under the Republican plan. Their plans for state Medicaid programs also will be scrutinized if massive GOP cuts to Medicaid funding are realized.
.. I can’t recall a vote this significant in terms of its political potential in 20 years.”
.. Trump’s political advisers calculated that it was less damaging electorally for congressional Republicans to pass a bill that some of their constituents see as deeply flawed than to have passed nothing at all.
.. Polling shows that the public disagrees with Republican health-care plans. Thirty-seven percent of Americans support repealing and replacing the law known as Obamacare, while 61 percent want to keep it and try to improve it
.. slash Medicaid spending by more than $800 billion and cut nearly $600 billion in taxes under the health-care law, most of which will benefit the wealthiest Americans.
.. the Republican bill would lift that prohibition and give states the option to let insurers charge more for them.
.. Wilson added, “Republicans in the House right now should be on their knees praying for the Senate to kill this,” arguing that the line of attack would be less powerful if the bill does not become law.
.. whether it’s the AARP saying it charges people over 50 five times more, or the American Cancer Society saying it guts protections for preexisting conditions. There’s no real way to defend that to voters.”
The Media Bubble Is Worse Than You Think
We crunched the data on where journalists work and how fast it’s changing. The results should worry you.
To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity.
.. No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.
.. “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans,” Silver wrote
.. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years?
.. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme
.. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.
.. The newspaper industry has jettisoned hundreds of thousands of jobs, due to falling advertising revenues.
.. In late 2015, during Barack Obama’s second term, these two trend lines—jobs in newspapers, and jobs in internet publishing—finally crossed. For the first time, the number of workers in internet publishing exceeded the number of their newspaper brethren.
.. Where newspaper jobs are spread nationwide, internet jobs are not: Today, 73 percent of all internet publishing jobs are concentrated in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix.
.. almost all the real growth of internet publishing is happening outside the heartland, in just a few urban counties, all places that voted for Clinton.
.. specialized industries like to cluster. Car companies didn’t arise in remote regions that needed cars—they arose in Detroit, which already had heavy industry, was near natural resources, boasted a skilled workforce and was home to a network of suppliers that could help car companies thrive.
.. Seattle’s rise as a tech powerhouse was seeded by Microsoft, which moved to the area in 1979 and helped create the ecosystem that gave rise to companies like Amazon.
.. Economists call these “non-tradable goods”—goods that must be consumed in the same community in which they’re made.
.. Newspaper jobs are far more evenly scattered across the country, including the deep red parts. But as those vanish, it’s internet jobs that are driving whatever growth there is in media—and those fall almost entirely in places that are dense, blue and right in the bubble.
.. The people who report, edit, produce and publish news can’t help being affected—deeply affected—by the environment around them.
.. The Times thinks of itself as a centrist national newspaper, but it’s more accurate to say its politics are perfectly centered on the slices of America that look and think the most like Manhattan.
.. Their reporters, an admirable lot, can parachute into Appalachia or the rural Midwest on a monthly basis and still not shake their provincial sensibilities
.. the media bubble reflects an established truth about America: The places with money get served better than the places without. People in big media cities aren’t just more liberal, they’re also richer
.. his trash talk was always directed at the national press, not the local.
.. It’s worth mentioning that Fox and Breitbart—and indeed most of the big conservative media players—also happen to be located in the same bubble. Like the “MSM” they rail against, they’re a product of New York, Washington and Los Angeles. It’s an argument against the bubble, being waged almost entirely by people who work inside it.
.. It’s hard to imagine an industry willingly accommodating the places with less money, fewer people and less expertise, especially if they sense that niche has already been filled to capacity by Fox.
.. Journalists respond to their failings best when their vanity is punctured with proof that they blew a story that was right in front of them. If the burning humiliation of missing the biggest political story in a generation won’t change newsrooms, nothing will. More than anything, journalists hate getting beat.