Amazon owner Jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris causing a major uproar. The LA Times’ billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong did the same thing two days ago. Editors are resigning, people are unsubscribing. It’s freaking out everyone in journalism. But this is actually bigger than journalism which is already in crisis for a hundred different reasons.
Everything about this story feels like a tempest in a teapot, a boiling story about legacy media fretting over itself in the mirror.
It’s not.
It’s a situation analogous to what we saw in Russia in the early 2000s: We are witnessing the surrender of the American business community to Donald Trump.
[…]
Following Trump’s 2016 victory, the Post leaned hard into its role as a guardian of democracy. This meant criticizing, and reporting aggressively on, Trump, who responded by threatening Bezos’s various business interests.
And that’s what this story is about: It’s about the most consequential American entrepreneur of his generation signaling his submission to Trump—and the message that sends to every other corporation and business leader in the country. In the world.
Killing this editorial says, If Jeff Bezos has to be nice to Trump, then so do you. Keep your nose clean, bub.
Last reminds us of the early 2000s in Russia when Putin, realizing that the oligarchs who had supported still maintained enough power to oppose him if they chose to, arrested the most powerful oil tycoon in the country ostensibly on charges of corruption.
Khodorkovsky was convicted and sent to a labor camp in the Russian Far East while the government confiscated Yukos and redistributed it to Putin’s cronies. Khodorkovsky’s money, his power, his connections—none of it could protect him from Vladimir Putin.
The rest of the oligarchs got the message. If Putin could get to Khodorkovsky, he could get to anybody.
Trump isn’t even the president yet. He can’t arrest anyone right now and, God willing, never will be able to. But these guys have all seen that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and the other tech-bro billionaires all lining up and they’ve decided that it doesn’t serve them to get on the other side of him.
Democracy expert Timothy Snyder has pointed out that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”
I don’t care about newspaper endorsements and most people don’t. But the fact that in both of these cases the papers’ ownership stepped in and stopped them at the last minute is seriously alarming. I don’t know if beating Trump can stop this premptive slide toward authoritarianism among the billionaires but I know that losing to him won’t.
This is yet another motivation to get out the vote. These billionaires only have one vote each. For now.
“Black Insurrectionist,” the anonymous social media persona behind some of the most widely circulated conspiracy theories about the 2024 election, can be traced to a man from upstate New York.
He’s also white.
With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Some were amplified by former President Donald Trump, his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and their Republican allies in Congress. The most salacious claims have come in the closing weeks of the campaign.
Last month, the account posted what Black Insurrectionist claimed was an affidavit from an ABC News employee, alleging Harris was given questions in advance of the network’s debate with Trump — which ABC News vigorously disputed. Trump approved, though, declaring, “I love the person.” More recently, Black Insurrectionist posted a baseless claim alleging inappropriate behavior between Walz and a student decades ago, a falsehood that U.S. intelligence officials said sprang from a Russian disinformation campaign.
The reach that the Black Insurrectionist account attained with assistance from Trump and his allies demonstrates the ease with which unverified information from dubious sources can metastasize online to shape public opinion. The speed and scale of disinformation has been an animating force in the presidential campaign, with the potential to affect the outcome in a close election.
The Black Insurrectionist account is linked directly to Jason G. Palmer, who has his own questionable backstory, starting with the fact that he isn’t Black, according to an Associated Press review of public records, open source data and interviews with a half-dozen people who interacted closely with Palmer over the past two decades. The records and personal accounts offer a portrait of an individual who has repeatedly been accused of defrauding business partners and lenders, has struggled with drug addiction and whose home was raided by the FBI over a decade ago. He also owes more than $6.7 million in back taxes to the state of New York.
[…]
In emails and phone conversations, Palmer, 51, made a series of seemingly contradictory claims about his ties to the account, which was deactivated last week several hours after the AP first reached out to Palmer for comment.
He acknowledged in an email that he was involved with the account, but said that he did not create it. He also claimed to have owned it at one point before selling it in April or May to a person who he declined to identify.
“I do not know what is going on with this account,” Palmer wrote in an email last Thursday.
But in an interview on Tuesday he said he participated in making claims about Walz that were posted to the account this month. And he suggested that he worked as a “researcher” with a broader group.
“We did that with big people. National people,” Palmer said. “I have no comment on anything else regarding that.”
Maybe that’s true but it’s just as likely that he’s a lone wolf ratfucker. Twitter is awash in this garbage.
Both The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post this week violated Timothy Snyder’s Rule No. 1 for opposing tyranny: Do not obey in advance. Both papers declined to issue a presidential endorsement. Many of The Post’s opinion writers objected vigorously. Whatever the papers’ ostensible explanations, we know the real reason. The owners are chicken shits.
America deserves much more than an aspiring autocrat who ignores the law, is running to stay out of prison, and doesn’t care about anyone but himself.
The better angels of our nature demand it.
There is only one candidate — Kamala Harris — who will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States from foreign and domestic enemies.
So help us, God.
Confronted as we are with what not to do, Anand Giridharadas at The Ink asks “our go-to messaging expert,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, to advise readers on how to fight the good fight. I’ll just list the bullets (with some light comments).
Do: Run like you’re leading the winning team
Don’t: Act like underdogs
Do: Call out what you’re against
Don’t: Feed what you’re fighting
This cuts across the grain of progressives who insist on proving to everyone how smart they are by refuting (with facts) whatever lies our opposition tells. It doesn’t work. It leaves Democrats fighting on the GOP’s turf and arguing they are GOP-lite. To soften up Trump’s support ASO suggests, “You have to run against your opposition and not against the people that your opposition reviles.”
Don’t forget that political races are not just contests of ideas, but contests of skills. Go hone your skills with campaigns where you are. See if your county committee has “game.” (Many don’t.) They want and need you.
I recorded an abbreviated For The Win webinar on Tuesday for Illinois county chairs. “But they’re not a swing state,” a friend said. Why bother? Because they’re not a swing state. See all that red? How often do those less-populated rural counties covered in soybeans, corn, and wheat in not-a-swing-state see a presidential race set up shop there and show ’em how it’s done? Wanna guess?
Stuart Stevens, former Republican strategist, called back this week to a post he wrote in The Bulwark in October 2020 “imploring my new Dem friends to finish the campaign with confidence and swagger.” Were he a leading Democrat, his message would be:
We are going to crush Donald Trump and the sickness he represents. There are more of us than there are of them. We are right. They are wrong. This is our moment. This is our destiny. Walk with confidence. Do not falter. Victory will be ours.
I once again make the plea. Arrogance is walking on the field, bragging you will win without having done the work. The Harris-Walz campaign and thousands of volunteers are doing the hard work. You’ve earned it.
No team wins the Superbowl thinking, “We might have a shot.” This is yours. Walk out and take it. You will look back at this moment with quiet pride and satisfaction for the rest of your life, knowing that when America called, you answered.
James Carville is not my go-to for advice because you know what he’s going to say whether he agrees with Democrats’ strategy or critiques it. Nevertheless, Fallows excerpts his New York Times op-ed on why he thinks Kamala Harris will be our first woman president. Mostly, for this:
My final reason is 100 percent emotional. We are constantly told that America is too divided, too hopelessly stricken by tribalism, to grasp the stakes. That is plain wrong.
If the Cheneys and A.O.C. get that the Constitution and our democracy are on the ballot, every true conservative and every true progressive should get it too. A vast majority of Americans are rational, reasonable people of good will. I refuse to believe that the same country that has time and again overcome its mistakes to bend its future toward justice will make the same mistake twice. America overcame Mr. Trump in 2020. I know that we know we are better than this…
A movement that marches with hope is 1,000 times as thunderous as a movement that marches with dread.
Fallows is betting that in the privacy of the voting booth Americans, women especially, will not choose “a felon “a convicted felon, who admires Adolf Hitler, whose mind is obviously deteriorating, whose most senior national-security staffers have warned urgently against him, who scoffs at Constitutional limits, who has no plausible platform, who knows nothing of US history, who brags about the most divisive Court ruling in modern history (Dobbs), who is a pawn of hostile foreign interests,” etc.
Liz Cheney, Harris and Barack Obama are working the “blue wall” states this week. Republicans are clearly unnerved by the chorus of voices from Trump’s first term — Cheney’s especially — warning the country they’ve served not to allow TFG near the White House again:
In all of these locales the message was: Precisely because time is short and the stakes are high and the prospects can be discouraging, it’s time to work even harder, rather than to give up.
Obama made this a standard riff. Each time he mentioned some new outrage from Donald Trump, the crowd would start to boo—and he’d immediately cut them off with: “Don’t boo! VOTE!” It became call-and-response. In her Blue Wall conversations with Harris, Liz Cheney would lay out their policy differences, but then say: We are absolutely together, in the only fight that matters.
Trump’s fascist movement has seduced a large fraction of the country. He’s ignorant, vengeful, and his dictator friends are scary. Exhortations of “we’re better than this!” fly in the face of proof after proof that we are not. And yet.
I keep returning to Dave Neiwert’s German language professor explaining how in the overwhelmingly Christian home of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, villagers living adjacent the Nazi death camps each morning, in their tidy Teutonic way, swept away the ash that fell on their windowsills overnight. Like many today, they blinded themselves to what was happening right next door:
“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”
Yeah, we fought them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here. Well, that hasn’t worked out. But we beat them before. We will do it again.
Race is remarkably stable. 47% of country is MAGA or open to MAGA; 53% isn’t.
The goal of Harris-Walz is to coalesce as much of 53% as possible. Today, Liz Cheney and Bernie Sanders are on the same side. That’s not a bad coalition.
The differences in polls are about the percentage of the 53% that Harris is getting. Trump stays stuck at 47%.
If you were for Trump, you were for Trump months ago. You are looking for someone else to be acceptable. He’s functioning as the incumbent.
Harris is winning a larger percentage of R’s than Trump is of D’s. She’s winning independents.
Could Trump win? Sure. But is there any element of the campaign that Trump campaign is performing at a higher level than Harris campaign? Think of it as a sports team match-up. She has better organization, more money, a better message and is performing at a much higher level than Trump. Most candidates are trying not to make mistakes at this stage of the presidential race. Exhaustion is a key factor. But Harris is improving. Maybe because she hasn’t been a candidate for a year and a half.
In campaigns, the question you ask every night is would you rather be your campaign or the other guy? I’d rather be Harris.
The only poll that matters is on Election Night. Remember that. Then gird yourselves for the backlash and sedition that will continue through certification aall the way to January 20. For now, I’m prepared to shed tears on Election Night. Tears of joy.
A woman, 58, called our county Democratic Party headquarters Friday with the other kind. Registered unaffiliated, she was angry that her mailbox is filled with attack flyers from Republicans and no mailers from Democrats. They’d stolen Harris signs from her early voting location. I tried to explain that Trump’s field team is incompetent, that Democrats are dedicating their resources to more effective turnout tactics. But the quavering in her voice revealed the real reason she was angry. She’s terrified.
The military widow was on the edge of sobbing for almost 15 minutes. Her late husband had spent a career serving this country. She, in turn, had spent her marriage supporting his work upholding the values for which the United States claims it stands. Staring down a fascist movement that’s overtaken many, both in the country and in the conservative area of the county where she lives, is more than she can bear. It broke my heart.
By the end, I had her relieved somewhat and chuckling through tears.
Our story is not over. Don’t count out America. It’s never a good bet, Joe Biden reminds us. We have reason to swagger.
Fallows too offered up a message from the 2011 Super Bowl about never being counted out. Because that’s who we are. That’s our story.
Enjoy.
Update: Forgot to convert the Eminem photo from html and it displayed something else. Fixed it.
Those eyes will charm you! Two adorable female southern sea otters, rescued off the coast of California, have made their New York City debut and will likely steal your heart.
Pumpkin and Clover were rescued at young ages, deemed non-releasable, and cared for as pups by caregivers at other accredited aquariums prior to arriving at the New York Aquarium.
They’re now settling in at the Sea Cliffs exhibit, where visitors can also enjoy exhibits featuring sea lions, harbor seals and penguins.
“We are happy to provide a home for these rescued southern sea otters,” said Dr. Leigh Ann Clayton, director of the New York Aquarium, located in Coney Island, Brooklyn. “These two otters have incredible stories, and we are pleased to see how well they are settling into their new home.”
The New York Aquarium has provided a home for 11 rescued sea otters since 1991.
Southern sea otters (Enhydra lutris nereis), also known as California sea otters, live on the coast of California.
Like all wildlife, they have an important role in the ecological health of the environment, according to the New York Aquarium. As a keystone species in Pacific Ocean near-shore waters, sea otters play an important role in their ocean ecosystem by eating sea urchins, which helps keep the populations in check.
Southern sea otters are listed as a threatened species under the United States Endangered Species Act (ESA) and are protected by the United States Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) and international treaties.
The Harris campaign raised $97.2 million in the first half of October alone, while the Trump campaign raised only $16.2 million, after Harris shook up what was previously a more evenly matched cash race (Biden and Trump had raised $284.1 million and $217.2 million in total as of the end of June, respectively).
The Harris Victory Fund—which raises money for both Harris’ campaign and Democratic groups—raised $1.2 billion this election cycle, according to a FEC filing released Thursday.
While Harris had already garnered a fundraising lead over Trump, her donations shot up in September: NBC News first reported that Harris and affiliated committees had passed the $1 billion mark since she entered the race based on her September fundraising, which included $47 million the campaign reported raising in the 24 hours after Harris’ debate against Trump on Sept. 10—her largest one-day haul since entering the race—and lucrative fundraisers in New York City and San Francisco last month that reportedly took in between $27 million and $28 million apiece.
The Harris campaign didn’t publicly report how much it took in in September before federal filings were released over the weekend, with the New York Times reporting it didn’t want to “brag” about its big donations and make voters complacent.
That kind of fundraising does suggest a lot of enthusiasm from regular voters. Trump on the other hand seems to prefer to have his voters send him cash directly by buying the hideous junk he’s selling. But then his campaign, through his super pacs, is doing just fine. He has a lot of enthusiasm too — from his pet billionaires:
Elon Musk has donated $119 million to Trump’s cause Timothy Mellon has donated $125 million Miriam Adelson has donated $100 million
Together those three billionaires have given $344 million.
That;s all well and good. But here’s a CNN piece from last month:
“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist,” Trump said at an Arizona rally on Thursday.
“This is a radical-left, Marxist, communist, fascist,” Trump said while attacking Harris at a news conference on Friday.
This wasn’t new rhetoric. “We have a fascist person running who’s incompetent,” Trump told Virginia residents during a campaign stop in August; at an Arizona rally in August, Trump said the true divide in American politics is between patriots with traditional values and “these far-left fascists led by Harris and her group.”
And Trump has gone beyond saying that electing Harris would mean an end to American democracy. He has said this summer that electing Harris would mean “you’re not going to have a country anymore” and that “we’re not going to have a country left.”
Not to mention him calling his political enemies vermin and saying they’re poisoning the blood of the country as well as a thousand other demeaning insults. He’s made over a thousand threats to punish or prosecute his political enemies.
Johnson and McConnell know very well that they are being unctuous hypocrites. You can just see the smug smirks they must have had while they were drafting that. It’s absurd. But that’s the point.
Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-M.D.) called today on Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by Jared Kushner, son-in-law and former senior White House advisor to ex-President Donald Trump.
As part of investigations launched last Congress by House and Senate Democrats, Senate investigators have uncovered that since the end of the Trump administration through mid-2024, Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners has received as much as $157 million in fees from foreign clients—including $87 million from the Saudi government—while generating no return on investment, paying zero earnings to investors, and investing only a small fraction of funds it has received from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.
Public reports indicate that Kushner remained politically active throughout that time period, particularly on matters of U.S. foreign policy related to the Middle East.
“While on the Saudi government’s payroll, Mr. Kushner is simultaneously serving as a political consultant to former President Trump and acting as a shadow diplomat and political advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and other foreign principals. Despite being engaged in plainly political activities, Mr. Kushner has not made FARA disclosures to DOJ related to the millions of dollars he receives annually by entities owned and controlled by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar,” Wyden and Raskin wrote. “The scale of these undisclosed foreign payments to Mr. Kushner coupled with the national security implications of his apparent ongoing efforts to sell political influence to the highest foreign bidder are unprecedented and demand action from DOJ.”
FARA is designed to ensure that the American public and lawmakers are made aware of foreign efforts to influence U.S. public opinion and political activities, and requires individuals acting as an “agent of a foreign principal” to register with DOJ. In their letter, Wyden and Raskin cite multiple examples of political activity Kushner engaged in while being paid by the Saudi government and other Gulf states without registering under FARA, in possible violation of federal law:
Advising the Saudi Crown Prince on U.S. foreign policy;
Advising former President Trump and his presidential campaign;
Selling geopolitical advisory and political advocacy services to foreign government clients through his private equity fund;
Arranging meetings on foreign policy with the Qatari prime minister on U.S. soil;
Engaging in political fundraising in support of Trump’s campaign; and
Influencing members of Congress on domestic and foreign policy.
He is 100% corrupt and has been messing in foreign policy just as much as Trump with his chats with Bibi every night.
I worry that the Democrats are going to do one of their patented “lets not look in the rerview mirror” thing again and it is completely unacceptable. It’s because they did that going back decades that we are where we are today. If they want the rule of law to be respected and useful, they have to hold these criminals accountable.
We don’t have to think about this right now. But after the election it’s going to be a very live topic and there will be massive pressure to let bygones be bygones to “bind up the nation’s wounds, blah,blah, balh.” No. Just no. Not this time.
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee sent out a statement this week drawing attention to the fact that the Trump campaign is dragging its feet with respect to the presidential transition process in which both candidates are expected to participate in anticipation of a possible win in November. Generally they start months ahead of time to get a head start on vetting people for staffing the large number of political appointee jobs throughout the administration and coordinating with the current staff to ensure a smooth transition to the new presidency. So far, the Trump team has missed two important deadlines to sign agreements to get it started.
Trump, you may recall, doesn’t respect this process very much, having fired his first transition team right after the election in 2016. And he prevented the Biden team from accessing the process in 2020 while he contested the election dangerously delaying them from getting started. However, one might think it’s a bit odd for them to do that this time since once you sign the papers you have access to money and services that make the whole thing easier.
But it doesn’t take a very stable genius to figure out why they are refusing. According to the NY Times, until all the documents are signed they can avoid the rules limiting private contributions to their transition and certain ethics rules that bar conflicts of interest. The Trump team doesn’t care for such restraints.
Trump has refused to take the usual security briefings, giving the excuse that he doesn’t trust the Biden administration (or the “deep state”) not to leak and blame it on him so at least we don’t have to worry about that. But we can see by this early decision to delay this standard bureaucratic process that our impression that they don’t plan to play by any of the usual rules is correct. The corruption that characterized the first term is already evident.
The Trump transition team is headed by Howard Lutnick, a longtime personal friend of Trump’s of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald and Linda McMahon, Trump’s director of the Small Business Administration and former wife and business partner of Vince McMahon who ran World Wrestling Entertainment.
According to the NY Daily News, McMahon has just been accused of “knowingly allowing the grooming, exploitation and sexual abuse of young boys throughout the 1980s and ’90s,” from when she was helping to run the WWE, according to a new lawsuit filed on behalf of five alleged victims. This would probably be cause for her to resign from any other presidential transition but considering his own history of sexual abuse it’s unlikely that Trump would care about such mundane accusations. It’s par for the course in any Trump administration,
Politico reported that Lutnick is causing quite a bit of consternation among Trump loyalists who believe that he’s edging out members for the first administration so that he can place his own people in the White House for his personal benefit. Republicans on Capitol Hill are likewise sounding the alarm due to the fact that he seems to be leveraging his position to lobby on behalf of Canter Fitzgerald among other investments including some very controversial crypto projects.
But Lutnick has a very important ally in Donald Trump Jr who is taking an important role in transition planning. He has said that he expects to have veto power to “block the guys that would be a disaster. He told Axios’ Mike Allen:
I want a veto power to cut out each and every one of those people,” he said, adding that an “advantage” of a second Trump term is that “now we know” who possible administration officials are.
He claims to trust Lutnick implicitly to pick the right people, telling Politico, “there’s nobody more loyal and capable than Howard, which is why my father picked him to help put together the greatest collection of talent to ever serve in the United States government.”
Lutnick claims that any complaints are all sour grapes coming from people associated with Project 2025 who have apparently been excommunicated from Trump’s inner circle for making the former president look bad. But the NY Times reports that there’s a different, much more secretive group that’s been putting together a very similar project, called “The America First Agenda” produced by the America First Policy Institute, a group formed four years ago in the wake of the 2020 election. Unlike Project 2025 this group is working directly with the Trump campaign, preparing for the second term. As it happens one of its directors is Linda McMahon, the co-chair of the Trump transition.
According to the Times, this agenda isn’t as voluminous as the 900 page Project 2025 and doesn’t feature some of the more sensational policies like outlawing pornography and prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills but it’s MAGA all the way. It calls for policies like mandatory ultrasounds for medication abortion and establishing only two legal genders along with a bunch of standard issue conservative movement policies going back decades. They claim to have already drafted nearly 300 executive orders ready for Trump’s signature.
There is one issue they take even further than Project 2025, however. It calls for “the elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them at-will employees .” That aspect of the plan is being implemented by none other than Howard Lutnick who has apparently frozen out all those Project 2025 Trump lackeys who signed on with the wrong team.
So you can see why the campaign doesn’t feel the need to bother with a traditional transition process. They are already vetting hundreds of MAGA faithful and planning to start dramatically expanding executive power the minute Trump takes power. But as with everything else associated with Trump, the whole project appears to be one part grift and one part vengeance with loyalists already backstabbing each other and currying favor with the Dear Leader. Some things never change.
We are a quilt in this country, Tyler Perry told a Kamala Harris rally in Atlanta on Thursday. A nation of immigrants. “We are all shapes, sizes and colors, but we are one.”
Look, unless you are a Native American, you and your people came from somewhere else. And even indigenous people on this continent came from somewhere else. Just over 20,000 years before Donald Trump and his America Firsters arrived. I mean, if we’re claiming privilege based on who was here first? But no. MAGA wants it all.
Perry launched a pointed barb against Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, saying he voted for a candidate who understands that America is a quilt.
“And I could never stand with a candidate who wants America to be a sheet.”
Perry paused to let the dual meaning sink in. The crowd didn’t miss it in Atlanta, Georgia.
