Beginning in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and his companions made a historic contribution to the annals of alchemy: They converted the lust for human contact into gold. Facebook’s current net worth is more than $500 billion, with Zuckerberg’s own share tallied at $74.2 billion, which makes him something like the fifth-wealthiest person in the world. Continue reading
It’s old news that Donald Trump abuses reason, knowledge, decency and dark-skinned people. You can’t tear your eyes away. You can already write tomorrow’s story: Today the vicious, deranged freak-show star trashed Enemy A, picked a fight with Failed Insider B, invited unconstitutional action C, insulted population D, declared his intent to abrogate Agreement E or make war on Country F, and denied facts G through Z. Fill in the blanks. Continue reading
The Trumps’ nine-day journey outside the United States was “incredible, historic . . . because it truly was an extraordinary week.” It was “unprecedented.” “We’ve never seen before at this point in a presidency such sweeping reassurance of American interest,” said press secretary Sean Spicer. Continue reading
The home page of Breitbart.com, the quasi-official voice of Steve Bannon’s White House, is a virtual stew of menace, a pit of monsters, an unending onslaught of apocalyptic horsemen rearing up at full gallop, coming straight at you, drawing closer. . . . But what the Breitbart reader is not being warned against is poisoned water, eviction, a melting glacier, a rising sea, a pauper’s grave, a burning cross, a bank swindle or a loss of medical care. Those are the kind of fears that afflict liberal wimps brainwashed by “the enemy of the people.” Continue reading
It came to this, on Day 1 of the New Order: Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, summoned reporters to a scolding more officially known as a “briefing,” in the course of which Spicer (1) lied to them repeatedly, (2) scolded them for lying, and (3) refused to permit questions. Andy Borowitz summarizes the scene nicely, in The New Yorker: “DISTURBED MAN GETS PAST WHITE HOUSE SECURITY, GIVES PRESS CONFERENCE.” Continue reading
Whether you think Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton prevailed in last week’s debate—Clinton by sounding like an adult, Trump by clenching his jaw to keep from foaming at the mouth—one undisputed winner was an entity called the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. That awkward mouthful adorns a letterhead think tank that moderator Chris Wallace cited twice as an authority on the purportedly world-shattering dangers of government overspending. Continue reading
The big story as I write is what Donald Trump said at a rally Aug. 9 in Wilmington, North Carolina: “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.” Continue reading
Liz Spayd’s launch column as The New York Times’ newest public editor is depressingly muddled. Her going-in premise is that the Times is alienating conservative “and even many moderate” readers, and her second is that this alienation is bad news for the Times as a business. Continue reading
What a week for the separation of powers! Not since December 2000, when a five-member majority of the Rehnquist Supreme Court stopped the Florida vote recount and placed George W. Bush in the White House—on the ground (as stated by the late Justice Scalia) that otherwise, Bush would suffer “irreparable harm”—has it been so crystal-clear that the Supreme Court is a body of men and women, not laws. These men and women durably hold views that go beyond—way beyond—legal citations. Continue reading
Over the holiday weekend, major media rightly piled on about Donald Trump’s recent recycling of neo-Nazi imagery—in particular his Hillary-hating blast featuring a six-point star affixed onto a heap of $100 bills. As both The New York Times and The Washington Post prominently reported, Trump cut and pasted neo-Nazi images from the Internet when he unleashed the latest round of his Twitter barrage at Hillary Clinton as “most corrupt candidate ever.” Continue reading
Suppose you turned to The Onion, America’s most pungent guide to the nation’s most gripping farce/reality-show hybrid, aka the political process, and saw this headline: “CNN Rewards Trump’s Ex-Campaign Manager for Lying to, Bullying Reporters by Hiring Him.” You’d think: Oh, what a crazy imagination satirists need nowadays just to keep up! To think that Corey Lewandowski, joined at the hip for 18 months to the most mendacious political candidate in memory, deserves a place on a news network! Continue reading
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Roy Moore, from the Gadsden Mall to the Ten Commandments monument
Sin of the sin-catchers.
Posted on November 24, 2017 by Todd Gitlin
The spectacle of 30-something Deputy District Attorney Roy Moore cruising the Gadsden, Alabama, mall hunting for high school girls to chat up, grope and “date” rivets our attention, and deservedly so. Not everyone’s attention, of course. As CNN’s Brian Stelter points out, Alabama’s own media have long overlooked his depredations. Even last week, a local paper persisted in claiming that the ex-judge has “refuted” his accusers. (They meant “rebutted,” but even that isn’t true.) But the tide has turned. Alabama’s three major papers—The Birmingham News, Mobile Press-Register and The Huntsville Times—have endorsed Moore’s Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, and their shared website dares Moore to sue over what he calls “defamation.” Continue reading →