Get 'Em, Harry

Talking Feds Substack

Why I Just Resigned From The Los Angeles Times

By Harry Litman

I have been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times op-ed page in some fashion for more than 15 years. For the last three years, I have been the Senior Legal Columnist, writing regular weekly columns about Trump’s legal troubles, the Supreme Court, and a wide range of other topics. The Times also permitted me to cover Trump’s trial in New York and the 2024 Democratic convention.

My editors have been skilled, quick, and fair. I have been able to write whatever I like, including blistering criticism of Donald Trump.

I’ve been proud of my work and proud to be part of the Times, the most prominent and storied newspaper west of the Mississippi. It’s got gravitas—and 45 Pulitzers to show for it—combined with a California flair that complements the constant variety and zaniness of my adopted state.

But I have written my last op-ed for the Times. Yesterday, I resigned my position. I don’t want to continue to work for a paper that is appeasing Trump and facilitating his assault on democratic rule for craven reasons.

My resignation is a protest and visceral reaction against the conduct of the paper’s owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong has made several moves to force the paper, over the forceful objections of his staff, into a posture more sympathetic to Donald Trump. Those moves can’t be defended as the sort of policy adjustment papers undergo from time to time, and that an owner, within limits, is entitled to influence. Given the existential stakes for our democracy that I believe Trump’s second term poses, and the evidence that Soon-Shiong is currying favor with the President-elect, they are repugnant and dangerous.

Soon-Shiong’s most notorious action received national attention. The paper’s editorial department had drafted an endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Soon-Shiong ordered them to spike it and make no endorsement in the election. (Soon-Shiong later implied he had just ordered up a factual analysis of both candidates’ policies, but that’s at best a distortion: he plainly blocked an already drafted Harris endorsement.) It is hard to imagine a more brutal, humiliating, and unprofessional treatment of a paper’s professional staff. Three members of the editorial page resigned in protest and 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.

Owners participate in setting overall editorial direction. But it’s a grave insult to the independence and integrity of an editorial department for an owner to force it to withdraw a considered and drafted opinion. And of course, this was no ordinary opinion. The endorsement of a presidential candidate is an editorial department’s most important decision, so the slight was deep.

It was also a deep insult to the paper’s readership. Like any major paper, the Times has a coherent and consistent line of reasoning to its editorial decisions. That can include idiosyncratic departures on particular issues. Where Trump was concerned, the paper had presented to its readers a long series of opinions that set out, with force and nuance, the great dangers of his return to office. That line of analysis culminated logically in the endorsement of Harris. For the Times to lead its readers to the finish line only to step off the track was bizarre and disrespectful.

By far the most important problem with Soon-Shiong’s scrapping of the editorial was the apparent motivation. It is untenable to suggest that Soon-Shiong woke up with sudden misgivings over Harris’s criminal justice record or with newfound affection for Trump’s immigration proposals. The plain inference, and the one that readers and national observers have adopted, is that he wanted to hedge his bets in case Trump won—not even to protect the paper’s fortunes but rather his multi-billion-dollar holdings in other fields. It seems evident that he was currying favor with Trump and capitulating to the President-elect’s well-known pettiness and vengefulness.

Trump has made it clear that he will make trouble for media outlets that cross him. Rather than reacting with indignation at this challenge to his paper’s critical function in a democracy, Soon-Shiong threw the paper to the wolves. That was cowardly.

And his decision had a sort of force multiplier effect with the similar conduct by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who rammed a similar non-endorsement decision down the throat of his editorial staff. There as well, there was no argument that the intervention was based on sensible policy contrast between Trump and Harris. History will record it as a self-serving protection of other holdings, which, as in the case of Soon-Shiong’s, dwarf the newspaper itself.

Before joining the Times, I was a contributing commentator for the Post. We used to say there, tongue-in-cheek, that our billionaire was better than their billionaire, meaning Bezos was more aware of his public responsibility and more hands-off in his oversight. As it turns out, both billionaires flinched when the chips were down, choosing to appease, not oppose, a criminal President with patent authoritarian ambitions.

Before he has even taken office, Trump has faced down two of the country’s most prominent newspapers, inducing them to back off longstanding, well-reasoned editorial opposition. That is terrifying.

As a commentator, especially one dedicated to constitutional norms and the rule of law, I have spent much of the last couple of years arguing that Trump is a genuine menace to our constitutional system. November 5 showed that a narrow majority of Americans who voted disagree or don’t care.

Yet here in Southern California and in Washington, D.C., we have evidence of tangible erosion of social guardrails in real time. Trump is in the process of commandeering and corrupting institutions of government and civil society that we have always counted on to nurture our democracy.

Look closely at this already deeply eroded landscape: all the electoral branches are not only Republican but firmly within Trump’s fist and dedicated to loyalty to him over any principle of governance. The Supreme Court has assisted his authoritarian initiatives in ways that the legal profession and society as a whole have condemned. His current nomination process is seeking openly to cut the Senate, even its Republican members, out of their constitutional advice-and-consent role.

For the moment, the best hopes for desperately needed pushback lie with federal law enforcement, the lower federal courts, the military, and (an economically weakened) mainstream media. All this is material for another Substack, but Trump has taken dead aim at imposing loyalty to him as the defining feature of the first three, including a proposal to permit him to discharge generals who are not, as he put it, sufficiently like “Hitler’s generals.”

So the role and responsibility of the media have never been greater. And if major outlets can be bought off and made to cower, the impact on our liberty—and freedom of thought—is in grave jeopardy.

Thus far, I have analyzed only Soon-Shiong’s most notorious and visible action of scuttling the endorsement. That put him in lock step with Bezos. But he has combined it with a general program of cozying up to Trump, especially since the election. Soon-Shiong ordered the shelving of a multi-part series, intended to run with the endorsement but broader and of a piece with the editorial page’s opinion over the last several years, which had been entitled, “The Case Against Trump.” His spiking of the series was part of the explanation given by the editorial board members who resigned.

There is more: Soon-Shiong went on Fox News after the election to talk about the paper’s editorial direction. He advocated “diverse perspectives” in the editorial pages and voices from across the political spectrum to avoid creating an "echo chamber." Most alarmingly, and escaping the notice of no one, he pandered to Fox and Trump by saying he wanted to make the Times more “fair and balanced.”

Soon-Shiong followed up by hiring a noted pro-Trump commentator, Scott Jennings, for some as yet ill-defined role of “balancing out” the views on the editorial page. Then most recently, during an interview on CNN in which he was asked about the Jennings hire, the normally mild-mannered Soon-Shiong went full Trump, labeling the CNN correspondent a "so-called reporter" before abruptly ending the interview.

Soon-Shiong’s argument for all these moves is to create “balance” on the editorial page, which still remains unstaffed and in chaos, and a neutral, “just the facts” approach to news. It sounds banal, but in fact, it is pernicious; and it goes to the heart of my reasons for leaving.

First, the idea of balance is fundamentally misplaced when on one side of the balance is a sociopathic liar like Donald Trump. The media has struggled for years to figure out how to call out Trump’s incessant lies while still covering the contentious issues of the day. There’s good reason to think that the propagation of those lies, some of which Trump simply picks up from fringe social media sites and Fox News, influenced the results of the election. The people who voted for Trump were fed a relentless false account of issue after issue, including Trump’s signature distortions about immigrants (eating pets, committing a disproportionate number of violent crimes), which Fox News and right-wing social media parroted relentlessly.

In that context, the bromide of just being balanced is a terrible dereliction of journalists’ first defining responsibility of reporting the truth. Soon-Shiong apparently would have the Times deliver an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand presentation to readers. But there is no “other hand.” Trump is an inveterate liar, and journalists have a defining responsibility to call that out.

These are not normal times. Look around. We are in the political, cultural, and legal fight of our lifetimes. Trump’s conduct since winning the election only reinforces his determination to replace constitutional rule with some form of authoritarian rule. That needn’t be 1933 Germany, an analogy that typically draws counter-charges of excessive drama (though the existence of certain overlapping features is inescapable). There are other models of democratic demise, ones that Trump obviously wants to emulate, such as Hungary’s slide toward authoritarianism over the last 20 years.

So the neutral posture that Soon-Shiong uses to justify his violence to the paper is exactly, fundamentally wrong. This is no time for neutrality and disinterest. It’s rather a time for choosing. And a choice for true facts and American values is necessarily a vigorous choice against Donald Trump.

I don’t pretend that my resignation is any kind of serious counter-blow to the damage of Soon-Shiong’s cozying up to Trump. And I see, and I thought about, the argument that my most constructive role would be to stay on and continue to use my one voice as forcefully as I could to explain to Times readers the grave dangers on the horizon.

But the cost of alliance with an important national institution that has such an important role to play in pushing back against authoritarian rule, but declines to do so for spurious and selfish reasons, feels too great. And Soon-Shiong’s conscious pattern of détente with Trump has in fact recast the paper’s core identity to one of appeasement with an authoritarian madman. I am loath to affiliate with that identity in any way.

My growing misgivings about the Times are one of the reasons I started this Substack two weeks ago. I’ve been blown away by the response and the number of followers and subscribers in just the first two weeks: thank you to everyone. Having this outlet for my thoughts about where Trump 2.0 is taking us makes it easier to leave.

I’m not going anywhere. I will continue to do my best to identify and analyze the dangers that might be hard to see, but for now, here on Substack. I may surface elsewhere, too. Stay tuned! I hope you will follow me here and think about becoming a subscriber.

I’ll close by quoting admiringly my former colleague and the former editorial editor at the Times, Mariel Garza: “I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up."

Talk to you later.

Better But Not Good Yet

The "conservative" attack on education over the last 40 years is having the desired effect. People don't care much about things like politics and government and economics because they're not being taught the importance of knowing something about that stuff to begin with, and once they get out into the real world, they're so tied up trying to make their lives work they get frustrated and start looking for somebody to blame, and that makes them vulnerable to the constant flow of propaganda flowing from "the right" (mostly).

And it'd be so gosh darned nice if the Press Poodles would remember to include corporate profits in the calculations of how shittily people are being treated, and how our attitudes are being cynically manipulated so we blame all the wrong people for all the wrong things.

Corporate America has blown past a brief wobble to its bottom line.

Driving the news:

The latest numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, out Wednesday, showed that total corporate profits in the third quarter grew 3.3% to an annualized rate of $3.28 trillion.

That's just shy of the all-time peak of $3.3 trillion reached in Q3 2022.

Why it matters:

The rise in profits last quarter shows that U.S. companies have been able to adjust to the post-COVID operating environment, which includes higher wages and higher borrowing costs.

So of course corporate critters are doing just fine

But then we have to remember: "The news" is a corporate profit center, so the "coverage" might be just a tiny bit skewed.

‘Excess profits’ at big energy and consumer companies pushed up inflation, report claims

KEY POINTS

• New research argues that the impact of companies maintaining margins by passing on higher prices to consumers should not be overlooked as a contributing factor to inflation.
• Researchers say this has made inflation “peak higher and remain more persistent.”
• They note that corporate profits are not the sole cause of inflation and did not cause shocks such as that to the energy market, but note that big international energy and food firms have an outsized influence on the wider economy.

The economy is improving under Biden. But many voters aren’t giving him credit

Despite the statistics, the kitchen-table experience of Biden’s first term has meant that many voters have experienced the last few years as a time of relative economic hardship

LAS VEGAS — Near the base of the Rainbow Mountains, Daniel Busby looks up longingly at his two-story “dream” townhouse, with the sliding glass door on its second floor, the balcony that wraps around the master bedroom, the five-minute walk from his kids’ elementary school.

“I just fell in love,” said Busby, 33, doing a chef’s kiss and smacking his lips together. “And then we started doing the math.”

The gregarious fry cook has enjoyed the windfalls of pandemic economic recovery overseen by President Biden. The president’s stimulus plan gave lower-wage workers more leverage to demand higher pay from their employers, with those in the service sector — like Busby — seeing particularly robust gains.

He went from being unemployed and working part-time at $15 an hour during the pandemic to a full-time job at the Paris Hotel, mostly at the Martha Stewart franchise, earning $19 an hour preparing a risotto dish and, his favorite, the whole chicken dinner. Busby and his wife now make a combined salary of just under six figures — a previously unimaginable sum.

But the gains have not kept up with rising costs, and that has become a major issue for voters like him. When Biden took the oath of office in January 2021, the average monthly mortgage payment in Las Vegas was about $1,200, according to calculations by Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. That number, for new mortgages, has soared to $2,350 today due to rising interest rates and robust housing prices — the outer edge of what Busby was willing to spend.

By many measures, the U.S. economy is a great success story — recession fears have fallen, along with gas prices and the unemployment rate, while manufacturing construction is up along with nominal wages and the stock market. The United States has grown faster since covid-19 than any peer country. Gas prices, once averaging over $5 a gallon, are now approaching $3. The Federal Reserve projects three interest rate cuts in 2024 that could help buyers like Busby.

But the kitchen-table experience of Biden’s first term — a roller coaster of covid adjustment and international shocks — has meant that many voters have experienced the last few years as a time of relative economic hardship. Despite rising wages, voters as a group lost spending power during 2021 and 2022 and have only recently climbed out of the hole. And even though wages are now outpacing inflation, prices are still continuing to rise: The latest government report showed inflation up 3.4 percent relative to the year before, fueling the anxiety even amid positive economic indicators.

A broad and diverse cross-section of American voters say they are experiencing the Biden economy as a challenging time of rising prices and high interest rates, according to interviews with more than 80 voters in four parts of the country — Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Phoenix and rural Georgia — that will play a major role in choosing the next president.

Adjusted for inflation, the per capita disposable income of U.S. residents rose nearly 1 percent from October 2021 to October 2023, a period that excludes the extraordinary one-time stimulus payments when Biden arrived, according to calculation by Robert Shapiro, a Democratic economist who advised Bill Clinton as president. By comparison, per capita disposable income, after inflation, grew about 7 percent under Donald Trump, during the first 34 months of his presidency.

The good news for Democrats is that the growth in spending power has been picking up over the last year at 3.7 percent through November, potentially setting the stage for a banner 2024, when wages will continue to grow even as the rate of inflation continues to fall.

“If incomes continue to rise rapidly over the next year, people will accept it by the election, especially since Biden’s record on jobs and growth is so much stronger,” Shapiro predicts. “Biden can overcome the fact that his income record — the growth of income — will not be strong over the whole term.”

But that is not the nation’s present-day reality. Biden’s polling on the economy has fallen with consumer confidence since he got into office, only recently stabilizing as confidence has begun to rebound. Wages are up, but the sting of higher grocery, coffee and restaurant bills remain. The president is still looking for credit from the budding manufacturing renaissance brought about by recent bipartisan legislation, though relatively few projects have been announced or begun production yet.

White House advisers are optimistic that the American public will soon internalize the good news and give the president credit before November. His political advisers note that other presidents who won reelection, like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, overcame challenging first-term economic conditions.

“We’re seeing real progress,” said Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, in a statement. “We have more work to do as we execute President Biden’s agenda, a sharp contrast with congressional Republicans’ plans to cut taxes for the wealthy and big corporations while raising health care and prescription drug costs for hard-working American families.”

People like Busby, who voted twice for Obama before sitting out the 2016 and 2020 elections, are not sure they will vote for Biden in 2024 — indecision that could tip the scale in a narrowly divided country. He has chosen, for the moment, to stay with his wife and two daughters, ages 10 and 6, in their 1,100-square-foot Vegas apartment, where the rent recently jumped from $1,100 to $1,600 a month.

After touring more than 30 houses, relentlessly monitoring Zillow and Redfin, and investigating all the first-time home buyer programs they could find, they have put their dream on hold.

“We work full-time hours, but we still can’t afford things. You think, ‘I work full time. I should be able to afford a house,'” he said. “I don’t want to come home one day and then realize I have to pack up and leave. It’s that sense of stability we’re missing.”

Barbers cut hair at Gee’s Clippers on Nov. 26. (Alex Wroblewski for The Washington Post)
‘It’s really hard to keep up’
Milwaukee

‘It’s really hard to keep up’

Milwaukee WI:

Ceree Huley, 75, looked around Gee’s Clippers, the Black-owned Milwaukee barber shop where he works. “This place on a Thursday would be full of people,” he said of the those years before the pandemic.

“I don’t know what the reason they’re not here. … A lot of people are going to do it to themselves,” Huley said, referring to individual haircuts. “Or are they hiding from the costs of the prices that went up 10 dollars or 5 dollars? That could be a factor too.”

After 50 years as a barber, Huley has seen his own wages go up recently but is also paying more for rent after moving to a new place. Unlike some of his customers, he doesn’t blame Biden for his economic situation.

“I don’t know why it is, it seems like the economy gets worse,” said Zontayveon Mosley, a 21-year-old warehouse supervisor, who had come in for a cut. “For the average person who’s making $45,000 to $50,000 a year, it’s really hard to keep up.”

He said he would have backed Biden in 2020, but didn’t vote. He added that he will not vote for him this year and would consider supporting Trump, citing U.S. aid to other countries and the economy.

“Like giving billions of dollars to support others, when we have people that can’t eat, we have people that can’t pay bills, it’s just insane to me,” he said. “I feel like most Black people just lean towards Democrats. But I don’t know, entering the workforce and making money, I own a home. I’ve got to worry about interest rates and all of that. I feel like Trump is a better businessman.”

A stream of Black customers provided a nuanced take on the economy under Biden as they came in and out of the barber shop — decorated with basketball hoops, framed photos of athletes and the forest green Milwaukee Bucks logo sprawled across a gymnasium-style floor, razors buzzing in the background.

Posters decorate an employee breakroom at Gee’s Clippers, a basketball-themed barbershop owned by Ceree “Gee” Huley, in Milwaukee. (Alex Wroblewski for The Washington Post)

The economy here has largely tracked national trends, with weekly wages just below the national average and a nearly identical unemployment rate. William Robinson, a 47-year-old FedEx package handler, said he ends the month with less money than he starts, and it’s “kind of more survival than living” when he goes food shopping. He supported Obama both in 2008 and 2012, but said he will not vote for either Biden or Trump in 2024, describing them as “pretty much the same.”

“You can’t set prices. Inflation, you really don’t control none of that. Really it’s all the stuff that I can’t control that’s kind of making it difficult,” said Robinson, who added that he now needs to make adjustments between wants and needs. “Everybody got their little cheat foods, you know what I’m saying? Like the little cakes outside of the nutritious stuff. You just can’t enjoy it. And even with the stuff that’s nutritious, you got to prioritize, you know?”

Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, said that voter views of the president and the economy “moved in tandem with objective economic indicators tolerably well up until the early 2000s.” Since then, partisanship has become more powerful and the link has begun to break.

In a recent survey, twice as many respondents said they’d heard about inflation compared with the unemployment rate. As for voters’ current perceptions of the economy, Franklin sees a combination of partisan bias and the effect of inflation on real disposable income, especially “coming after this sugar high of transfer payments in the pandemic years.”

It’s a trend that cuts both ways. Ken McClendon, a 51-year-old in the health-care-manufacturing business, said his wages have gone up but his economic situation was better before covid, given that “everything is more expensive now.”

Biden’s handling of the economy was a “little shaky,” he said, before adding, “You have to realize what he walked into.” If the election comes down to a choice between Biden and Trump?

Biden “all the way,” he said.

‘Who gets credit for a dumb idea?’

Dalton, GA:

One of Biden’s legislative triumphs can be seen through the trees 80 miles north of Atlanta along Interstate 75, a gray, low-slung roof factory of Qcells North America.

The South Korean-owned plant expanded after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, adding 510 jobs to the growing solar industry. The panels its workers make in a 12-hour shift can produce as much solar power annually as the Hoover Dam’s peak output.

But few at the Oakwood Cafe in nearby Dalton have noticed in this conservative corner of the state, represented by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R). Dalton Mayor David Pennington (R) dismissed the government support of solar panels as the pet project of politicians, embraced both by Vice President Harris, who visited the plant in April, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R).

“Who gets credit for a dumb idea?” Pennington said, laughing. “When both sides are agreeing on something, it probably proves it is a stupid idea.”

When a guy deliberately misunderstands what's going on, and he shits on the simple fact that more of his constituents are getting fairly decent jobs, we see how intellectually corrupt way too many Republicans and Libertarians have become.

Pennington says residents most often ask him what he’s doing to help address the falling test scores of the city’s students. Families tell him that their grocery bills have gone up in the last three years. Pennington said that the night before, after a governmental meeting, he and his wife went to Krystal, a regional fast food joint, and ordered burgers, fries and drinks for $23, a meal he remembers costing $12 five years ago.

At a nearby table, Eric Azua, a local Realtor and registered Republican, made the same point: He has benefited himself from the Qcells expansion. He said he has sold homes to workers who are able to afford more given higher wages, offering Azua better commissions. But he credits local officials for the new jobs, rather than the Biden administration. Like many others in the area, Azua plans to vote for Trump.

“He needs to be replaced,” he said of Biden.

In 2018, Trump’s steep tariffs on solar panels from China prompted Qcells to build the facility in Dalton. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — including a provision by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) — provided tax credits for every stage of the solar manufacturing supply chain, incentivizing Qcells to expand.

Such expansions of U.S. manufacturing have been happening around the country in recent years, spurred by federal incentives supported by Biden. Monthly manufacturing construction spending rose from $77 million to $207 million between January 2021 and October 2023, a jump of 170 percent, according to census data. It’s progress that Biden has highlighted in his television ads this fall, talking about new manufacturing jobs, new green energy to lower power costs.

“For Joe Biden, it’s about restoring the sense of security working people deserve,” says one Biden spot that has run in Georgia.

The industrial park near the highway that cuts through Dalton has boomed since Qcells first opened there. Beside the first Qcells facility at the site, a second sleek, brightly lit warehouse has popped up, where workers are assembling commercial and residential solar panels with the help of automated machines.

“There are not other jobs similar in the area,” said Lisa Nash, general manager of the Qcells factory. “We can take high school students, people who have made other products, and if they have an aptitude, we can train them. And it’s upskilling.”

Other jobs have come downstream. Mary Sumner, who voted for Biden in 2020, recently started working for the local janitorial company that contracts with Qcells as an extra source of income aside from her job managing an apartment complex. She knows she is part of a minority in her family of 10 and hometown that would give any credit to Biden for anything positive, including the new source of money she receives.

“Four more years and there’s even better things to come,” Sumner said.

Jan Pourquoi, a Democrat and owner of a small Dalton carpet company, attended Harris’s visit to the site. When he looked around the room, he didn’t see anyone who lived in Dalton.

His neighbors and friends tell him they are worse off financially than they were under Trump and they believe Republicans are doing more to address immigration and drugs — or at least they seem to talk about it more. In the last local election, 9 percent of registered voters cast a ballot. In 2024, Pourquoi expects there won’t be any surge of voters supporting Biden, especially for the solar initiatives.

“There are more people aware of Qcells outside this area than in this area,” he said. “What it definitely will not do is change anything on the political dial.”

‘Everything has gone up in price’

Phoenix AZ:

Martha Isela Rodriguez remembers when she would go just once a week to buy her groceries at the Fry’s right around the corner from her house.

Now, she checks her mail daily to see the weekly ads with specials and coupons for grocery stores. El Rancho Market has deals on fruits and vegetables on Wednesdays and meat on Thursdays. On the weekend, Food City tends to have some good specials, too.

For Rodriguez, it has become the norm to visit three grocery stores a week — and even then, she’s still paying more than before.

Standing in the kitchen heating tortillas on a comal, a cast-iron skillet, Rodriguez recalled how she used to pay much less for groceries when Trump was president. Everything, from the chuletas de cerdo to the jalapeños she uses for her salsa, was cheaper. And that $380 electricity bill she just paid? It had never been so high, she remarked.

For her, all these higher costs spell trouble for Biden, who she voted for and knocked on doors to get elected in 2020. Her home county of Maricopa went for Trump in 2016 by under three percentage points and then backed Biden in 2020 by just over two percentage points. But she’s skeptical that Biden will win Arizona — or the 2024 election.

“Personally, I see it difficult for Biden to win. There’s already so many people who feel he hasn’t done anything, that the economy isn’t working,” Rodriguez, 48, said as she passed her 1-year-old granddaughter, Maria Daniela, an apple, mango and spinach baby food puree as a snack.

She was hearing it from her co-workers whom she had convinced to vote for Biden in 2020. Now, they either say they won’t vote this year or they’re considering backing Trump. They taunt her for pushing them to support Biden in 2020 — complaining to her about how bad inflation was under Biden and how he was letting in too many migrants and helping them when he wasn’t helping the undocumented immigrants already living here.

“They tell me things like, ‘Look at the gas. It hasn’t gone down at all since your Biden came into power.’ Your Biden, they tell me,” she said. “They say the same with a box of eggs or a gallon of milk. ‘Now that your Biden is around, the prices are up and the salaries don’t match it.’”

“And what can I say? Yes, it’s true,” she added. “Everything has gone up in price.”

Due to inflation, it cost an Arizona family over $2,700 a year more to purchase the same goods and services last August as it would have cost in August 2022, according to an analysis in September by the nonpartisan Common Sense Institute.

The sharpest increases came in distinct sectors, including gas prices, which rocketed higher in early 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, and have since fallen back to 2021 levels. The pain of those increases was felt especially in suburban and rural areas, where people like Rodriguez drive long distances on a daily basis.

Rodriguez said she knew it wasn’t necessarily Biden’s fault that inflation remained an issue in Phoenix, as she’d heard of it being a challenge globally. But she said she wished he would project more confidence and stability like Obama, the politician whom she said she became a U.S. citizen just to vote for. In her eyes, she said, Obama was handed a terrible economy after George W. Bush’s administration and was able to turn it around.

“Biden just doesn’t have that magic, that energy to get things done,” she said.

In a matchup between Biden and Trump, Rodriguez said she’ll vote for Biden again. It won’t be because he’s done a good job, she said, but because of just how strongly she dislikes Trump.

She added, however, that she doesn’t plan to repeat her election-year summer of knocking on doors in the Phoenix heat to get other Latinos out to vote for Biden this time.

Press Poodles

Paranoid Mike says:

We are presented with a dilemma - the kind of dilemma SunTzu talks about in The Art Of War.

ie: Don't give your adversary a problem he can solve. Give him a dilemma that will work against him no matter what he chooses to do.

I can't help but think the plutocracy pushers are doing a lot of shit designed to give us that Damned-If-You-Do-And-Damned-If-You-Don't dilemma.

With a few exceptions, "The News" has left behind all sense of public service. It's a profit center, and the guys who own the Yacht-Buyers Club insist that their news division chiefs go on pretending there's a perfect balance between the extreme assholes (primarily on "the right") and the rest of us.

Competition is fierce, and the bean-counters refuse to believe they're doing a bad thing by pandering to the 10-20% of the audience who call themselves "independents" while actually being all but hardcore wingnuts who just don't want to admit publicly that they voted twice for Bush43 and then for Trump. "Fascists buy dick pills and panty liners too, y'know."

We know something's horribly wrong, but we have a hard time putting our finger on it.

ex: Count the number of times Katy Tur says, "Deeply divided" in any interview or political analysis she delivers on MSNBC.

While it's true - we are deeply divided - her phrasing strikes me as purposely ambiguous, and she never explains it so as not to invite the inference of Both Sides.

Yes we're deeply divided - like we're deeply divided on the Pros and Cons of Ass Cancer.

So, on that whole dilemma thing: 

I subscribe to WaPo and NYT, and I pay for MSNBC thru my Sling thing. Those three outlets comprise my main source of news. I pay for them, and I try to balance it all out with Reuters and AP and BBC - because I have the time, and I'm a bit of a politics geek.

A lot of people don't have the money or the time or the inclination to indulge the way I do, so they rely on picking up a few things from whatever source comes to hand, and after they get slapped down a few times for speaking up about something they thought they had a pretty handle on, only to be made to feel silly or stoopid or naive or whatever, they often retreat behind the Both-Sides shield: "They're all full of shit - you can't believe anything any of them says - etc etc etc"

Some will support a corporate model in the news because they support the basics of top-down authoritarian rule in business, even as they decry the same kind of tyranny in government, while they're advocating for "running government like a business". In fact, they'll parrot the Daddy State bullshit about how the government is "meddling" in the news companies' business by trying to hold them to account, "and that's the tyranny - corporate monopolies are the real victims here".

But the majority - people who are decent folks - people who make good friends and responsible citizens - they're the big squishy middle - the trend followers. Most of them won't get it, but will go along because they've been taught that popular = good.

(By 1974, the Ford Pinto was the best selling American-made care in the US)

Meanwhile, the minority of us who can afford the luxury of critical thinking are rendered politically impotent.

If we back away from the news, we're ceding the territory to the plutocrats.

If we back away from the politics - same thing.

If we raise our voices, then we're branded as the radical left and the Press Poodles can say we've shown their Both Sides crap to be accurate.

But the needle is moving a bit. I think if we keep at it, the needle will move some more, and then the dilemma is reduced to a solvable problem.

People who need a free press the most, are less and less able to afford it.

People who can afford it are using it to split the majority, keeping people siloed and isolated from each other.

This does not make for a healthy democracy.

It’s Not a Good Sign When People Who Don’t Pay for News Have So Little to Choose From

In a recently published profile of the former CNN executive Jeff Zucker, a tidbit of news caught my eye. Zucker, who has a venture fund with $1 billion to invest, is one of at least three suitors seeking to buy a controlling stake in Air Mail, a glossy media company catering to the jet set elite, founded by the former Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter. A recent weekly edition includes a profile of the caterer turned mercenary magnate who is a close ally (and possible competitor) of Vladimir Putin, an excoriation of new diversity rules for the Oscars and an article on Adele’s go-to rosé. It’s a frothy mix of European royals, luxurious fashion and salacious true crime, redolent of the Vanity Fair of yore. Air Mail has made quite a splash: It threw a star-studded bash with Warner Brothers in Cap d’Antibes that was the toast of the Cannes Film Festival last month. It is generally a fun read. I have been a subscriber for a while.

Still, it was jarring to see that this confection has so many suitors, checkbooks at the ready, at a time when the butcher’s bill in American journalism grows longer and longer. Last week, The Los Angeles Times announced it will reduce its newsroom staff by 13 percent, a month after the paper celebrated winning two Pulitzer Prizes. Last month, Vice, a company that once seemed like the invincible future of media, sought bankruptcy protection. BuzzFeed shuttered its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division. Insider slashed its staff by 10 percent earlier this year; its journalists are currently on strike. Hundreds of journalists from Gannett, the once mighty local news company, also staged a short strike last week after years of staffing and budget reductions. We’ve seen deep cuts at the major TV and cable news networks. MTV News closed its doors.

And last week, the pain hit close to home for me: Many of my former colleagues at Gimlet, the ambitious podcast studio where I worked from 2020 to 2022, lost their jobs. The pink slips landed shortly after the team won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative podcast.

The loss of jobs in any industry, particularly one as central to protecting our democracy as journalism, is always worrying. But what makes these losses particularly troubling is what many of these news organizations have in common: They sought to make quality news for the masses that cost little to nothing to consume.

In an ever more unequal world, it is perhaps not surprising that we are splitting into news haves and have-nots. Those who can afford and are motivated to pay for subscriptions to access high-quality news have a wealth of choices: newspapers such as The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times compete for their business, along with magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Niche subscription news products serving elite audiences are also thriving and attracting investment — publications like Punchbowl News, Puck and Air Mail. The people who subscribe to these publications tend to be affluent and educated.

It bodes ill for our democracy that those who cannot pay — or choose not to — are left with whatever our broken information ecosystem manages to serve up, a crazy quilt that includes television news of diminishing ambition, social media, aggregation sites, partisan news and talk radio. Yes, a few ambitious nonprofit journalism outlets and quality digital news organizations remain, but they are hanging on by their fingernails. Some news organizations are experimenting with A.I.-generated news, which could make articles reported and written by actual human beings another bauble for the Air Mail set, along with Loro Piana loafers and silk coats from the Row.

I’ve been thinking about the problem of news for people who don’t pay for news since the last months of the 2016 presidential campaign, when I was offered a job as editor in chief at The Huffington Post, succeeding its namesake, Arianna Huffington.

Before that, I really hadn’t seriously considered leaving The Times, where I had worked for almost 15 years, mostly as a foreign correspondent. I had experienced firsthand the lengths The Times would go to report in some of the most far-flung and dangerous places in the world. My editors had sent me from the Himalayan peaks of Kashmir to the dense jungle of eastern Congo, from the desert scrub of Darfur to the sodden deltas of Bangladesh. They literally sent me to Timbuktu. Twice!

Still, I took the meeting. I knew that something had gone wrong with American journalism. Local journalism was in free-fall. Trust in the news media was reaching new depths. And most worryingly, the news organizations that were thriving were the ones that people paid for directly.

Then Donald Trump won the presidential election, and I felt that maybe in that moment there was work to do elsewhere. Maybe HuffPost, with its huge home-page audience, could be a vessel for testing this question that had been nagging at me: How can you make a quality news product for people who were never going to pay for news? What would it mean to create a news organization that saw itself not as writing about people who feel left out of the political, economic and social power arrangements, but for them? I took the job.

With its clever, large-format headlines and populist sensibility, HuffPost had the feel of a left-of-center tabloid, like The New York Daily News in its heyday. We would make news for everyone on the internet, for free. Corporate America, via digital advertising, would foot the bill. If this all sounds overly optimistic, if not downright naïve, well, it was. But what else could one do in those desperate postelection days but fuse dreams and work and hope for the best?

In a way, this plan represented a very old model of paying for quality journalism, one that began in 1833, when a young businessman named Benjamin Day had an idea. As Tim Wu wrote in his book “The Attention Merchants,” most of New York City’s newspapers at that time were priced at 6 cents — the equivalent of more than $2 today — a luxury good aimed at a tiny, wealthy audience. Day realized that he could make more money if he charged readers just a penny for his newspaper, and then sold their eyeballs to businesses who wanted to sell them stuff. His newspaper, The New York Sun, set the template for the news business in the United States for most of the next two centuries, even as new technologies such as radio and television transformed how news was distributed.

Capturing mass attention required access to expensive means of distribution: either a press and delivery trucks for print, or access to the public airwaves — which were licensed by the government — for broadcast. These costs allowed the news organizations that could afford them to corner the market on mass audiences, whose attention they then sold to advertisers. The handsome profits they reaped enabled investments in high-quality journalism, including high-risk and expensive endeavors such as investigative reporting and international coverage.

We all know what happened next. The internet, which initially promised to propel this old model even further by reducing distribution costs to near zero and creating the tools to sell ever more sophisticated kinds of advertising, instead created an economic crisis for journalism. Newspapers still had to produce their expensive print products even as the advertisements that paid for them gave way to much cheaper and more highly targeted digital ones. Paid classified advertising evaporated. Local news cratered, and even titans like The New York Times faced existential threats.

Meanwhile, the digital revolution brought a new crop of news organizations roaring to life, unburdened by physical production costs and powered by new forms of information distribution. HuffPost figured out how to reverse-engineer news articles that matched information people were searching for on the internet. Then social media arrived, and with it the opportunity to build huge audiences across people’s social networks, an art perfected by BuzzFeed. Sensing the opportunity for hypergrowth, venture capitalists piled into the media business, sending the valuations of these digital upstarts into the stratosphere. On paper, at least.

Powered by those dollars, some companies invested in quality journalism, just like the old-school newspaper publishers had when the market buoyed them. HuffPost won a Pulitzer in 2012. Vice News produced groundbreaking television coverage of the far right. BuzzFeed News invested deeply in investigative journalism and international reporting, and also won a Pulitzer. It seemed, for a time, that a new form of quality mass media was emerging on the back of new technology.

And then it all fell apart. Advertisers began cutting out the middlemen — publishers — and buying advertising directly from social media platforms, which offered what was sold as laser-sharp targeting of a company’s most desirable customers. And after Trump, who augured a new era of misinformation online and a ton of new headaches for social media companies, digital platforms largely fell out of love with news. The spigots that had gushed money-spinning traffic to new sites ran dry.

It turned out that I had arrived at the digital media party just as it started to wind down. It was almost impossible to sustain quality journalism with advertising alone. At HuffPost, we went through several rounds of layoffs in three years. Ultimately, I encouraged Verizon Media, which was then HuffPost’s owner, to sell the site to a company more focused on news. When it didn’t sell, I decided to leave. Less than a year later, Verizon all but paid BuzzFeed to take HuffPost off its hands.

HuffPost, with its big home-page audience, is less reliant on social media networks and has survived. It is smaller and less global than it once was, but it continues to employ talented and enterprising journalists who break news. But with all the layoffs, closures and bankruptcies it is hard not to feel that the old dream of digital news — lots of free, quality and diverse news from lots of different places — is mostly dead.

Instead, there are a few very successful media companies that charge people money for high-quality journalism. The best news organizations take their public service mission seriously, and do create news products that are free to all, like podcasts and email newsletters. Some have relatively porous paywalls, and even drop their paywalls entirely for coverage of major events involving public safety. But many surviving free consumer sites are cutting staff and focusing on aggregation — which is an important service, but not the same as investing in original journalism. Television news is dominated by talking heads as budgets for real news-gathering shrink. Cable news is in terminal decline in the age of cord cutting.

The current landscape means the mass audience that never paid for news and never will pay remains underserved, and that has big implications for the future of our country. Creating a shared reality was always the work of mass media. But our present and future look much more like the 1830s, with one class of people getting tips on summering in the South of France from Air Mail and everyone else reading whatever A.I.-generated aggregation the internet spits up.

For the better part of two centuries, news that was free — or at least felt free, owing to its reliance on advertising — was good business. But the advertising dollars that once underwrote ambitious mass journalism are now stuffing the pockets of technology billionaires. We’re all — even those of us willing and able to pay for quality journalism — the poorer for it.

Fading Away

MSNBC - Morning Joe

Tickets on StubHub were available at about $1 for the throngs descending on the golf course in hordes of 2, and sometimes upwards of 3. It was a mad house.

The standard GOP play is in process - the erasure of a bad presidency. They're stuffing it all down the Memory Hole.

One major development is the (apparent) fact that somebody has gotten to Trump and convinced him not to announce for 2024 until after the midterms this fall. And that may have been as simple as the RNC telling him straight out that once he announces, they'll have to stop paying his legal bills.

Not that they've been all that good at following the rules on such things. 

Suddenly they're sticklers?

One other interesting tidbit: Trump may be getting hip to the changes going on. He may be more aware that his endorsement is becoming a kiss of death in a growing number of races, and while one of these things may have nothing to do with the other, this thing in Missouri looks a lot like he's hedging his bets to a ridiculous point. It could also be just a matter of Trump trying to be cute and clever - which makes him look even less serious about anything other than his own standing, but then again - when did that start to matter?

Anyway, in the Missouri GOP Senate primary, there are 3 guys named Eric running, at least 2 of which are Über-MAGA freaks, so Trump decided to issue his endorsement by saying he supports "Eric".

Meanwhile, DumFux News hasn't had Trump on their air in over 3 months.

Ari Melber - MSNBC

At Last A Mea Culpa - Kinda

Wait for the razor in the apple. Because there's always a razor in the apple.

Amanpour & Co - Walter Isaacson with Tim Miller

You caught it, right? At about 14:52?

No, Walter - the failure of Republicans is NOT the fault of Democrats - not in any way.

Republicans have a network of wingnut media, "think tanks", and lobbying organizations, all funded by wealthy plutocrats.

Democrats have to contend with all that plus a corporate media filled with Press Poodles (like Mr Isaacson) who can be counted on to frame their questions in GOP talking points, and a host of Never-Trumpers who've screwed the pooch to the point of tipping the GOP into full-blown fascism, but still have the gall to tell Democrats how to run their party.

Miller gets some credit for his mea culpa, but he has no call to shit on Democrats who always have to do the work of un-fucking this country - hard work made necessary by the outright fuckery of Miller and his pals - fuckery that continues even now.

That said, I'll buy the fucker's book just to see if he actually grovels a little, or if it's just a way to rebrand, and get himself back on the market.

Today's Tweet

Well - prob'ly not weird at all.

Weird how more than a week after a Democratic wave electing tons of women and further diversifying our government, the mainstream media isn't giving us lavish profiles of Democratic voters who rejected the GOP and Trump.

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 17, 2018

Cable news needs the catfight. They don't get any nice spikes in the ad revenue chart by running segments on how the majority of voters are actually just normal folk who think normal thoughts.

Years Late

...but maybe not too late - he mused, wistfully.

Nicolle Wallace is among the pimpiest of the spin pimps in American politics. Her skills as a strategist and communications director have been in service to some pretty fucked up politics over the last 20 years or so.

Most notably, she was a key player in John McCain's campaign in 2008, and ended up refusing to cast a vote for POTUS because of her misgivings about the choice of Sarah Palin.

So anyway, there she is every weekday on my librul TV thingie, bashing away at Cult45 while painstakingly avoiding the reality of her own work making this shit not just possible or probable, but inevitable.

However, when they finally sit up and make the right kinda noise, I think Press Poodles should be acknowledged for trying to do what's right.

PoliticusUSA:

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace wouldn’t air Trump’s remarks on immigration from the White House until she preemptively fact-checked them.

Wallace explained on her show Deadline: White House, “Donald Trump is making remarks in the Roosevelt room this hour. Five days before the midterm elections and a day after admitting to ABC news that he tells the truth only when he can. Today’s remarks come after weeks of engaging in a deliberate strategy of stoking fear about the humanitarian crisis in Central America. A slow-moving caravan of asylum seekers and migrants. They also come after — come days after a war of words with house speaker Paul Ryan about birthright citizenship. Donald Trump’s divisive speech has been cited as contributing to the climate in which the synagogue shooter targeted Jewish Americans and the pipe bomber targeted trump’s critics. Because he’s used immigration in blatantly political ways and in an abundance of caution, we’ve decided to monitor those remarks, fact-check them against his rhetoric and record on immigration and bring you the important news from them.”

It's kind of a bold move - calling his bluff.

45* has blustered about how "the press" can't survive without him. And he's been pushing hard, using a very old tried-n-true method that assholes like him have used forever - often with great success - to manipulate people. ie: exploit the self-doubt that often grows out of a dedication to being open-minded.

So, Nicolle Wallace announces a new policy of fact-checking his statements instead of just airing whatever he has to say. 

(BTW - fact-checking is kinda what you were supposed to be doing in the first place, dummy)

Put that together with what's been happening on All In with Chris Hayes, where in the last few days, he's taken to calling 45* out on his lies, using that word. L-I-E-S.

All of this seems like a very good sign. It makes me wonder if Phil Griffin knows he's doing something decent, or if it's just starting to show up in the analytics that people think he's behaved like an unprincipled hyper-capitalistic dickhead, contributing to the demise of our little experiment in self-government.

We'll see.

Call 'Em Out

When you notice something wrong in the way the Press Poodles are behaving - like normalizing Trump's shit, Both Sides, etc:

AP: 212-621-1500

ABC: 212-456-7777

CBS: 212-975-4321

CNN: 434-827-1500

NBC/MSNBC: 212-664-4444

NPR: 202-513-2000

NTY: 212-556-1234

NTY DC: 202-862-0300

WaPo: 202-334-7410

WSJ: 212-416-2000

Curiouser

It's one guy - and it's CNN - but there seems to be an increasing amount of smoke.

Dmitri Alperovitch said that their firm did, in fact, catch 2 groups associated w Russian intelligence agencies in the act#TrumpLeaks pic.twitter.com/jJDyfBwUmM

— Khary Penebaker (@kharyp) December 13, 2016

John Oliver

That's called Journalism.

We used to be able to count on news magazine shows like 60 Minutes for that kinda thing - ah, those were the days. Have you even seen that shit lately?

In CBS's defense, at least they pointed up some of the problems and some of the efforts being made to help people who've come home with some real problems that they either didn't have when we sent them over there, or who may have had the beginnings of a problem that just got a lot worse - but at any rate are beset with problems simply because we're so determined to make these kids do shitty things to other people while practically ignoring the shitty things happening to them because of the shitty things we sent them over there to do.

And it oughta be pretty easy to see a parallel between Army Rangers in Iraq and militarized cops here at home.

Whatever; but notice - the CBS piece is like Thoughts-n-Prayers Journalism.  It tells the story in such a passive voice that we get to think of ourselves as informed and compassionate, but still pretend these problems aren't really our problems; we even get to think these problems are totally disconnected from anything we've ever done - like voting for the wrong politicians - or not bothering to vote at all - or supporting the War Machine companies who maintain a near strangle hold on half-a-trillion tax dollars every fucking year.

And that's the difference as I see it - Oliver is addressing the problem, but he's also talking about the connections with what "our government" is doing in our names, while it seems like CBS is going out of its way to ignore all that so they can give us the Facebook version.

There's not so much as an acknowledgement of right-or-wrong about any aspect of the veterans' troubles; and they're sure as fuck working hard to avoid inviting an inference that maybe we oughta make something of a commitment to work for solutions - at the very least we need to be talking about pressuring the GOP (mostly) to get up off their asses and stop trying to starve the VA into a privatization scheme that benefits practically nobody but their cronies.  

Because above all else, Press Poodles earn their kibble by making sure we don't end up thinking we need to do anything - cuz that might mean pushing a few dollars towards helping Americans and away from the commercial interests of a corporate content provider.

Gimme John Oliver and Samantha Bee every time.

More Cracks

First - reports of the demise of DumFux News are greatly exaggerated - or maybe they're just kinda premature.

But second - dang - It's been more than a little obvious for a good long time that Fox and the GOP are so inter-connected as to be divisions of the same Billionaire Hobby Corporation. So much so that if one craters, it pulls the other one in after it. And isn't that a happy prospect?

Some Kinda Of Sick Sense

Today's tweet, and holy fuck - this makes the whole vulgar charade into an even bigger shit show than we thought.

Trump "considering creating his own media business built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid" https://t.co/hdZ2P4nNcd

— Sarah Posner (@sarahposner) June 16, 2016

Here're the first few graphs from the Vanity Fair piece:

Every election cycle has its own breakout media star. In 1992, it was CNN. A few years later, it would be an e-mail blast called the Drudge Report. By 2000, the country had more or less been neatly delineated between MSNBC and Fox News households. The 2008 election introduced Politico and the Huffington Post to the adults’ table. BuzzFeed joined in 2012. 

The breakout media star of 2016 is, inarguably, Donald Trump, who has masterfully—and horrifyingly—demonstrated an aptitude for manipulating the news cycle, gaining billions of dollars worth of free airtime, and dominating coverage on every screen. Now, several people around him are looking for a way to leverage his supporters into a new media platform and cable channel.

Trump is indeed considering creating his own media business, built on the audience that has supported him thus far in his bid to become the next president of the United States. According to several people briefed on the discussions, the presumptive Republican nominee is examining the opportunity presented by the “audience” currently supporting him. He has also discussed the possibility of launching a “mini-media conglomerate” outside of his existing TV-production business, Trump Productions LLC. He has, according to one of these people, enlisted the consultation of his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who owns the The New York Observer. Trump’s rationale, according to this person, is that, “win or lose, we are onto something here. We’ve triggered a base of the population that hasn’t had a voice in a long time.” For his part, Kushner was heard at a New York dinner party saying that “the people here don’t understand what I’m seeing. You go to these arenas and people go crazy for him.” (Both Kushner and Ivanka Trump did not respond to a request for comment.)

"Breaking"

Wow. Hey look - breaking news.  Corporatized Lobbyists don't just write the legislation; and they don't just bribe our Coin-Operated Politicians to vote for or against it - they also tell us what our opinions are.

The Intercept:

OPINION COLUMNS PUBLISHED in California newspapers over the last year in support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership use language nearly identical to drafts written and distributed by public relations professionals who were retained by the Japanese government to build U.S. support for the controversial trade agreement.

Take this column by former San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders, who now serves as the president and CEO of the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, in the San Diego Union-Tribune, titled: “Trans-Pacific trade pact benefits San Diego.”

Much of the language in Sanders’ op-ed also appears in a “San Diego Draft op-ed” distributed by Southwest Strategies, a consulting firm paid by the Japanese government to promote the TPP:

Jerry Sanders: “Notably, the TPP includes Japan, which is significant”

Southwest Strategies: “Notably, the TPP includes Japan, which is critical”

And somehow, this is news.  Full circle. The loop is closed.  Has been for a while, actually.  Nothing to see here.  Get back to work; or go back to sleep; or watch some more of the Daily Freak Circus on TV.

They pretend to tell us what's going on, and we pretend that none of it really matters.

Isn't it great to live in a free society like USAmerica Inc?