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Wed, 24/04/2024 - 08:00
He wasn’t the only one, although he appears to have been the only one who was directly conspiring with Trump. Rick Perlstein wrote about the tabloid support for Trump at the time. So did I, writing about the Drudge effect: Some years back, Washington Post reporters Mark Halperin (currently of Bloomberg News and MSNBC) and John Harris (now editor in chief of Politico) wrote a book about political journalism called “The Way to Win: Clinton, Bush, Rove and How to Take the White House in 2008.” In it, they made a famous admission about how Beltway journalism works in the digital age: Matt Drudge rules our world … With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts. So many media elites check the Drudge Report consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too.
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Wed, 24/04/2024 - 06:30
The defense will try to say that Trump was just trying to keep these allegedly false accusations about his womanizing from Melania. Please. She knew who she was married to. He’s on record saying he’d be dating Ivanka if she wasn’t his daughter. He once said when asked if he would stay with Melania if she was disfigured in a car crash: “How do the breasts look?” He very famously once said: “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] writes as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”  She herself went on Howard Stern and said that she and Donald “have incredible sex once a day, sometimes even more.” She had no trouble defending his grotesque Access Hollywood comments: So no, Trump wasn’t worried about Melania. She had a pre-nup.
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Wed, 24/04/2024 - 05:00
I’m not so sure Robert Kutner thinks JD Vance is the only guy who can keep the MAGA/corporate coalition going after Trump. He writes: WITH THE PUBLICATION IN 2016 of his best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance marketed himself as a self-made man who had risen above his troubled origins. For Vance, poverty was all about self-defeating values. In my review of his book in the Prospect, I described Vance as Charles Murray with a shit-eating grin. As I wrote: Hillbilly Elegy turns out to be a very sly piece of work that professes to express great nostalgia and compassion for the hillbilly way of life. (“Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family.”) But Vance is on the trail of a bait and switch. Despite the down-home charm, he ends up sounding condescending to his neighbors and kin. Vance not only excelled at Yale Law; he is now at a Silicon Valley hedge fund. And, according to Vance, you could be, too—if you weren’t so gol-durned lazy. If you weren’t selling your food stamps, blowing off jobs, deserting your kids, and getting stoned on Oxycontin.
Created
Wed, 24/04/2024 - 04:57
One wonders how the Australian mainstream media will react to the news that India, the so-called biggest democracy in the world, has thrown out ABC correspondent Avani Dias from the country. Dias was denied a visa after her program Sikhs, Spies and Murder: Investigating India’s alleged hit on foreign soil was aired on the ABC Continue reading »
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Wed, 24/04/2024 - 04:56
The idea that nuclear submarines can be built in Adelaide under AUKUS has the characteristics of the “group think” that led to invasion of Iraq in 2003, and has been described by former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer as a “bit of a fairytale”. “Some government in the future will make the obvious decision and not Continue reading »
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Wed, 24/04/2024 - 04:55
Unlike virtually every non-Anglophone country on the planet, Australia still has no mandatory teaching of foreign languages in its schools. Why do we assume, as a matter of colonial entitlement, that people from non-Anglophone countries will understand us, but it is not even a matter of decency to make the same effort to understand them? Continue reading »
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Wed, 24/04/2024 - 04:51
Former US ambassador Chas Freeman argues that Iran’s strike “changes all the rules of the game in the Middle-East”. For Ambassador Freeman, the most important factor is that: “the Saudis, the Emiratis and others informed the United States that they would not permit American operations against Iran from their territory and Iran warned those states Continue reading »
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Wed, 24/04/2024 - 04:50
A mass grave created by the IDF has been uncovered at a Gaza hospital, where Palestinian civilians appear to have been the victims of a gruesome massacre. “Bah, that’s old news Caitlin,” you may be saying. “We already know about the massacre and mass graves which were discovered a few weeks ago at the al-Shifa Continue reading »
Created
Wed, 24/04/2024 - 03:30
According to MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin: During a sidebar about the relevance of Steve Bannon’s requests of Pecker, Steinglass admitted that New York Election Law 17-152, which prohibits conspiracies to promote a candidate’s election through unlawful means, is their “primary” predicate. It appears that this is the theory the Manhattan DA has settled on. Of course it was a conspiracy. It was composed of three people and two of the members of the conspiracy have either pleaded guilty or have immunity and are testifying against the third: Donald Trump. The question all comes down to whether or not the jury believes them — and the mountain of paperwork that backs them up.