Honestly, this seems like a no-brainer. Having Pentagon press access means you get to break stories sooner, but if your only reporting what the Pentagon gives you, you’re basically just getting press releases a little earlier. That’s not worth giving up you’re ability to get an exclusive story from a leak, and there’s always someone who wants to leak something. I’m sure that even these journalists’ cooperate overlords see agreeing to this as a bad business decision.
I don’t think it’s even, “friends,” I think it’s just Rob Citrone. It probably doesn’t hurt that Melei has kissed Trump’s ass, though.
Oh yeah, for sure. Everything DOGE did was a farce, and it almost certainly lost more money than it saved. Even en if it didn’t, they blew any savings up on their first budget legislation. I just find it particularly hypocritical to cut $40 billion in global aid because, “we don’t have the money,” then turn around and spend $40 billion on global aid to a single country
$40 billion was the entire annual budget of USAID. No matter what you think of them, they did provided essential aid to dozens of nations, and DOGE destroyed them under the pretense of lowering the deficit. Now we’re spending that much money just to prop up one countries economy.
(Yes, I know they USAID is a soft-power tool of American imperialism, and is rumored to have been used as cover for CIA operations, but they also did a shit-load of global AIDs prevention work, and I’d rather have spent the $40 billion on that than bailing out a libertarian freak so Rob Citrone can get rich.)
Shit, I assumed that data was relatively recent to the study’s publication. It doesn’t even cover Citizens United!
I mean, Princeton released a study over a decade that the U.S. was no longer a democracy but an oligarchy. I understand that the author means where descending into authoritarianism, but this didn’t start with Trump, and we left democracy behind a long time ago.
It’s kinda insane that the largest entertainment company in the world can be completely up ended because one guy unilaterally decided to cave to fascism.
This is a lot like when Disney fired James Gunn after an astro-turfed right-wing campaign (spearhead by Mike Cernovich) convinced them that there was genuine outrage over some tweets he’d made a decade prior. Disney fired Gunn, there was a huge public backlash in response, and the entire Gaurdians cast threatened to walk. When they finally tried to rehire him, he was working for their largest competitor, which caused them to delay Gaurdians 3 by several years, and now Gunn is pulling DC studios out of it’s nosedive as Marvel is tanking.
Anyway, this time is a little different, because they’re clearly bowing to authoritarian government pressure as well, but they clearly misread the publics mood on this once again. It’s super weird that this billion dollar company keeps doing lasting damage to itself because it thinks Twitter is real life.
Oh yeah, Brett Kavanaugh saying race can be a factor in ICE detainments even though it directly contradicted their own ruling on Affirmative Action made it clear they don’t give a shit about precedent, even when it’s their precedent.
Moron or not, she is correct. The Supreme Court has ruled multiple times that hate speech is protected under the First Amendment.
They spent so long equating criticism of Israel with being pro-Hamas that they accidentally made the kids pro-Hamas.
Yeah, but you gotta keep calling it out when they use it to try to coronate someone.
The new poll, conducted by Echelon Insights, has Newsom in second place among potential Democratic candidates with 13 percent support, behind former Vice President Kamala Harris with 26 percent.
The number one spot right now is the woman who lost the last election, while number two is the guy who’s been in the news lately. This is basically just measuring name recognition. It’s more than 3 years until the election, a frontrunner is meaningless at this point.
The 5 conservatives that actually give a shit about state’s rights are gonna be so pissed.
Eh, I trust Stewart’s motivations, but not necessarily his judgment. I listened to him interview Ezra Klein and Stewart fell for his neoliberal Abundance bullshit without any pushback of critical thought. I could see him getting led astray by some of the same Democratic hacks that destroyed the party.
Is, “influenced by billionaires,” a euphemism for, “she let her uber executive brother-in-law talk her into gutting any economic populism from her campaign in favor of tepid centrist policies that cost her the election and ushered in a new era of American fascism?”
I’m sure some of them will believe whatever the narrative is, but some of them have been on this train since the early QAnon days. They’ve been promised arrests, public executions, and a, “great awakening,” where their conspiracy theories about the deep-state pedophile cabal is exposed and their children call them and apologize for uninviting them to Thanksgiving. Trump created a very big fracture with those people a few weeks ago when he told them to shut up and stop talking about Epstien, and his damage control has been very poor. Maybe he can get ahold of the narrative again, but he’ll need to do more than have a human trafficker say he did nothing wrong.
We’ll see. He spent the last 6 years stirring up this Santanic-panic pedophile shit, I don’t think it’s going to be that easy to put down. Besides that, he’s about to throw us into a massive recession with huge inflation. Ive never been one of those, “Trump is finished! There’s no way he’s coming back from this!” guys, but this really seems like a perfect storm of events that will hurt his most loyal followers.
I really don’t think that Trump giving a human trafficker special treatment to say that he isn’t a pedophile is gonna play out as well with his base as he thinks it will.
Carl?