Tragedy and farce

Oh, please. Did all of you clowns sleep through the 1970s?

President Donald Trump relieved acting Attorney General Sally Yates of her duties Monday night after she directed Justice Department attorneys not to defend Trump's controversial executive refugee and immigration ban.

Yates, a holdover from the Obama Administration, was replaced by Dana Boente, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Boente, 62, was sworn in Monday evening. He will lead the Justice Department until Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump's nominee for attorney general, is confirmed by the Senate.

What does the Mouth of Sauron have to say about the developments?

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Yates had "betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States." The executive order, which Trump signed Friday, temporarily halted the entire U.S. refugee program and banned all entries from seven Muslim-majority nations for 90 days.

Oh, and if you're wondering how the terrorist attack on a Quebec mosque managed to fall off the front page so fast:

The suspect was identified as 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a student at the nearby Laval University, the CBC reported. Bissonnette also was charged with five counts of attempted murder.

A second man, Mohamed el Khadir, was initially identified as an additional suspect by Quebec officials. Reuters and the French language newspaper La Presse reported earlier that one of the suspects was of Moroccan origin, a report that was picked up by Fox News and other news outlets. But police later announced there was only one suspect in the attack, and Khadir was identified as a witness.

How strange. Comments don't seem to be enabled on that story.

Today in cognitive dissonance

Well, there's the problem. Turn your back on the Fair 'n' Balanced Network to cook dinner or grade papers or something, and there's something freshly bizarre that pushes the morning's apparent bizarritude to the back burner.

This one, I think, is interesting, because Friday evening's top story is basically a first-class ticket on the unheated cattle car to Siberia: an admission that Massster's unhinged racism might present a real challenge to actual US interests.

President Trump signed an executive order Friday designed to “protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals” by temporarily suspending the entry of immigrants from several Muslim majority countries –Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

While the proposal is not finalized, it is already drawing outrage among some Iraqis who have taken the lead in the fight against ISIS, a defeat which the new president has said is also his top foreign policy goal.

“Iraqis are the largest victims of terrorism and now we are paying double the price,” one high-ranking general in the Iraqi Army, who requested anonymity as he is not authorized to speak to the media, told Fox News. “This has caused massive disappointment in the hearts of every Iraqi who is fighting radicalism.”

Another Iraqi with close ties to the Iraqi Forces Intelligence community said the proposed ban symbolically sends a message that “their lives are cheap.” Others conveyed fear given that they have been waiting in-line for resettlement for years – their lives under militia threat for their American associations – only to now be told that they may not make it out. 

The first few grafs might be a surprise to whoever pushed the buttons to create the graphic that follows, which is about a different country (more in line with bb dayorder) altogether:

Which, distractionwise, helps set the stage for the evening's No. 2 story. Take it away, Fox psychiatrist* Keith Ablow!

The media is all abuzz, again, about the fact that President Trump spent some time during his televised interview with ABC anchor David Muir pointing out the large size of the crowd in photos of his inauguration. Journalists, who still don’t seem able to understand that Trump is almost always several steps ahead of them, once again are heralding the president’s seeming preoccupation with the issue.

Is the president actually so thin-skinned that he needs the world to acknowledge that a huge number of people turned out to honor him as he was sworn in? Um, no.

So what’s really going on in his mind? Here’s my opinion: Everything Donald Trump does is strategically calculated to achieve a goal. His communication is designed not to simply convey his gut feelings, but to make people focus on one thing — call it a decoy — so he can do six other things while they’re distracted.

In this case, Trump has masterfully used the media’s pathetic naiveté and desire to battle him to make them focus on a throwaway battle — his seeming obsession with crowd size (which I can almost guarantee he could not care less about) — while he determinedly does what he does care about: signing orders that resurrect pipeline projects, retooling our broken immigration laws, laying the groundwork for a better health care system and preparing to build the wall.

Well, what if I'm a journalist who still doesn't get it?

For journalists who still don’t get it, here it is, again, in direct terms: When Trump says something like “If I were you I would take your camera and look at the size of the crowd,” he is actually saying, “Let’s debate crowd size, again, because otherwise you might ask me questions about my real and historically powerful plans and ideas, which I don’t trust you to report on fairly, anyhow.”
 
A journalist who might even come close to Trump’s level of strategic communication should then say, “Ah, the old watch this hand while I work magic with my other one? No, we shall not linger an instant on that silly issue my colleagues in the media are focused on. Let’s sit down and talk about the pipelines, again. I don’t want to walk around and snort another line of that drug you know the media is addicted to.”

Oh, good. A lesson in strategic communication! But having come this far with Dr. Ablow, let's enjoy the finish:

The drug, by the way, is called taking the easy path of the pithy, sensational, stupid story. And lots of journalists who get paid lots of money seem to be hopelessly hooked on it.

The rest of us, over the next 90 days or eight years, will watch Trump masterfully ignite one squabble after another that the members of the press fall all over themselves to engage in, while he remakes the world.

Man, I am just so happy this guy went to work for us. I’m still pinching myself. It’s like a miracle.

You have to wonder what happens when Fox staffers run into each other in the hallways.

* Who, according to his Fox bio, studied at some place called "John Hopkins." I know that's a cheap shot, but -- damn, can't you guys do anything right?

Shall we start a pool?

When Hannity has an exclusive with Massster, it goes in the lead spot, you bet:

DEVELOPING –  President Donald Trump defended his forthcoming executive orders suspending the United States' refugee program for 120 days and halting the issuing of visas to citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries, saying, "We can't take any chances."

"Right now, the FBI has over 1,000 [terrorism] investigations going on … and these are people that we let in," Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity in an exclusive cable interview from the White House Thursday. "We don’t need this. Some people have come in with evil intentions. Most haven’t, I guess, but we can’t take chances."

The executive order, which Trump could sign as early as Saturday, would prohibit citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria or Yemen from obtaining U.S. visas for at least 30 days.

Ready to switch to the fact claims?

"We’ve taken in tens of thousands of people. We know nothing about them. They can say they vet them. They didn’t vet them. They have no papers. How can you vet somebody when you don’t know anything about them and they have no papers?" Trump asked.

Have at it, liberal media!

War on Beady Yellow Fruit

It's a Sean Spicer joke, now with added Elongated Yellow Fruit!

Starting in 2010, the man who would become the top spokesman for the President of the United States devoted scoops of tweets to attacking the beady frozen treat known as the “Ice Cream of the Future.”

Who could ask for anything more?

Piggy? Party? Porky?

At long last, The Washington Post, which sensibilities are we protecting here? Even if you have trouble settling the one-word-or-two question, surely a quick search will suggest that "pussyhat," at least, has had some currency in your pages in recent days.

The naughty-words question is part generational, part cultural and part routine. When I started working at America's Newspapers in 1977, the possible appearance of "damn" or "hell" in print called for a consultation with the managing editor. Two decades on, we get-off-my-lawnists were at the barricades against the Butthole Surfers. By now, even the AP Stylebook has capitulated on "snafu" ("acceptable despite its vulgar origin"). News language is historically conservative (with rare exceptions, like Trib spelling), and it's certainly less unpleasant to be attacked as a prude than as a vulgarian.

As with "major league asshole" in 2000, there's also a heat-of-the-moment factor. It's hard to define the point at which an event stops being news, but the farther we get from the event, the more likely it is that a vulgarism -- or another taboo violation, like an image of death -- will be seen as gratuitous. "Seen by whom" is yet another question; you might be offending someone, but it's fair to calculate whether it's nearly everyone or those dwindling few who actually call the office and offer to proofread the paper for free at the sight of a wayward comma. And at some point, someone has to make a decision.

Much as I enjoyed the "Fuck You Cheeto Voldemort" sign, I wouldn't have waved it into a newspaper. But I would gently suggest that anyone who's tempted to cancel the old subscription over "This Pussy Fights Back," in this story, probably shouldn't have started reading it in the first place. As a rimrat, I might ask whether we're sure it wasn't "This Pussy Grabs Back,"  but I probably would have hyphenated "major-league asshole," too.

Hand-knit, hairy-legged flying yellow people eater

It's been a great week on the Elongated Yellow Fruit front! First, "hairy-legged winged mammals," shared from World Elongated Yellow Fruit Headquarters in Kansas. Then this, from the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

Women wearing “pussy-hats” -- hand-knit pointy-eared pink winter headgear -- held posters with derogatory messages and phrases bashing the president and filled the National Mall.

My favorite derogatory message so far has been "Look at all the correctly spelled signs!" Your mileage may vary.

Pronouns: The farewell tour

Shed a tear in passing for the specious pronoun count as an index of thinly veiled right-wing racism presidential narcissism. We may never see its like again -- though with a few hours left in the regular season, you don't want to rule anything out.

The pronoun meme deserves a spot in the Fake News Hall of Fame for its sheer persistence. (The flying verb in Drudge's play from last Wednesday  makes clear that this isn't a story that needs a lot of explanation.) It relies on three observations:
1) The Kenyan usurper uses first-person pronouns! Which most of us -- oops -- do pretty often.
2) The Kenyan usurper uses them N or NN or NNN times! Whether that's a proportion or a raw number, whether it's per minute or per word, or whether it's more or less than any of his predecessors, doesn't signify. GAAAAAAH!
3) Therefore narcissism! Which, sort of like the perpetual bedwetting over the Kenyan threat to "fundamentally transform" America, always ends up leading back to someone like Reagan, who used first-person pronouns with a pretty human regularity and closed out his tenure by congratulating himself on fundamentally transforming a lot more than that:

And something else we learned: Once you begin a great movement, there's no telling where it will end. We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.

Imagine what Fox News might have thought. Wait, don't.

Anyway, there's an enduring archive of pronoun madness over at Language Log. That doesn't quite get all the details, such as what we learn from how the meme spreads. Drudge's Wednesday play is from the Daily Caller, which seems to have a new aura owing to Tucker Carlson's ascent at Fox but is otherwise its same old droolery self:

President Obama referred to himself 75 times in his farewell address Tuesday night, according to a review of his prepared remarks by The Daily Caller.
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Well, not really. Not at all, actually

Let's skip all the stuff about context, framing and the social construction of reality and look at a chunk of nice, old-fashioned, entirely fabricated fake news. Given those conditions, we're less interested in the creation of meaning -- after all, there is no unframed condition of news -- than in how far toward the center an out-and-out lie can spread.

The Drudge Report, as usual, isn't the originator, but it's an important indicator, because outfits (say, the Times) that don't spend much time with the drooler media do look at Drudge. Here, the vaguely policy-oriented sites (Heat Street, Campus Reform, the Education Action Group), which often wipe most of the foam off before they go out in public, are on an equal footing with sites that dispense entirely with the bib, like InfoWars and -- have you guys met ZeroHedge yet?

In the month leading up to the election on November 8th, we repeatedly demonstrated how the mainstream media polls from the likes of ABC/Washington Post, CNN and Reuters repeatedly manipulated their poll samples to engineer their desired results, namely a large Hillary Clinton lead (see "New Podesta Email Exposes Playbook For Rigging Polls Through 'Oversamples'" and "ABC/Wapo Effectively Admit To Poll Tampering As Hillary's "Lead" Shrinks To 2-Points").

Sadly, no. As in no, you didn't "demonstrate" anything, and no, that's not how sampling works, unless you have access to cheap and reliable time travel, in which case -- for an operation touting "the news that moves the markets" -- you seem to be missing a major career opportunity. As even the morons of the "unskewed polls" movement acknowledged four years ago, a difference between party identification and voter intent is not evidence of playing around with the sample. If you know the former, you can go back in time and skew the latter. Do send a postcard.

The point, again, isn't whether another huckster is playing Duke-and-Dauphin with the rubes. It's how far up the beach any specific fiction is washed before someone picks it up. Not every made-up story leads the Drudge page; the one about the pizza parlor didn't make it, but the one about Podesta drinking the chicken blood did:

And, to reiterate, the intent doesn't have to be for every story to produce an armed attack on an innocent restaurant. All that has to happen is for the story to get close enough that someone has to spend time denying it.

This is going to be a tough habit to break for news organizations that still fear they might miss the next Hoovergate, but really -- if you can't ignore fake news, at least you can run a laugh track behind it. The polls weren't rigged, the employment data weren't cooked, and you should make sport of anyone who says otherwise.

Including the president-in waiting? Well, that would be an encouraging sign.

Gollum gollum gollum

While you're enjoying Friday morning's Fair 'n' Balanced homepage (in order, Brave Massster! Wicked, tricksy Soros! Hobbitses are mean to Massster! Massster makes us happy!), ponder what it might look like when different arms of the Murdoch empire start to disagree with each other. Here's the Journal, for example, from the beginning of the week:

The report concludes “with high confidence” that Mr. Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election” to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” It also concludes that Mr. Putin “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

Yet the report offers no evidence or judgment that the hacking influenced the election result. The leaks from Clinton aide John Podesta’s email and the Democratic National Committee were embarrassing in their candid views of individuals, but they included no bombshells. The emails that really hurt Mrs. Clinton’s electability were those she kept on a private server while Secretary of State.

My, my, my. That's certainly not what Massster said at his news conference!

But remember this — we talk about the hacking, and hacking's bad, and it shouldn't be done, but look at the things that were hacked. Look at what was learned from that hacking, that Hillary Clinton got the questions to the debate and didn't report it? That's a horrible thing. That's a horrible thing. Can you imagine that if Donald Trump got the questions to the debate, it would have been the biggest story in the history of stories, and they would have said immediately, "You have to get out of the race." Nobody even talked about it. It's a very terrible thing.

Nor, of course, is it what Fox thought as those bombshells kept landing:

Should you have actually read the stories, you probably agree with the Journal: Even the ones that Fox fabricated (no, the Clinton Foundation didn't pay for Chelsea's wedding; no, "a longtime Clinton confidant" didn't "express regret that the terrorist wasn't a white man") fall apart in the sad light of day. That doesn't mean that the emails on the Sekret Server were the ones that "really hurt Mrs. Clinton's electability"; the Journal is making that up, because that's what editorial writers do with fact claims about public opinion. It means that "the emails" worked as a Fox story because real issues and fake issues became indistinguishable.

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Eggcorn seeds

Interesting comment* from the judge in the guinea pig trial. Want to know what it looks like at the crosstown competition?

The judge noted Wednesday the teens didn’t have prior criminal records and were good students from good families, but said he put off the sentencing by for a while to make sure there were no “deep-seated issues” that needed to be addressed with the young defendants.

The guiding wisdom of the AP Stylebook, "Never alter quotations even to correct minor grammatical errors or word usage," doesn't apply here. In this sort of case, that's exactly what the writer heard (and step forward anyone who writes for a living and can claim to a perfect record on this front.) The assembly line of news, though, evolved a set of processes that vastly increased the chances of such blunders being caught -- even if by a typesetter who was better at spelling than half the newsroom.

Blunders got through in the good old days of full employment and double time and a half for holiday shifts, and blunders will get through when the last editor is reassigned as a content creator. If you want a product in which they're rare enough to call attention to themselves, you need to let your content providers know. Preferably with subscriptions or large stacks of unmarked bills.

* Now, alas, corrected online.

Leave my garage out of this

On the bright side (unlike -- could it be a year ago Wednesday?), the local paper isn't telling us not to put away the snow shovels yet. But it's still hard to see the journalistic value in telling me how to prepare for using a snow shovel, rather than estimating the likelihood that the ... oh, no.

Once again, it is not "the white stuff." It is never "the white stuff." There are no circumstances under which "the white stuff" does not place your mortal soul in danger. Shun it forever.

What about "windchill"? Not soulwise, but one word or two? You could ask what the story says, but it wouldn't help -- no mention of wind chills in the print edition. This is from the online version, which is a few grafs longer:

The average temperature this time of year is about 26 degrees, she said. Today, temperatures are in the upper teens in the Detroit area, but the wind chill makes it feel like 6 degrees.

Two words, just as the AP Stylebook has it. Though the stylebook probably would have let you figure out on your own that "6 degrees" doesn't mean "below zero."

Fake news: It isn't fair, it isn't right

These aren't "news," in that they've been sitting on the desktop for a while and I'm trying to get things cleaned up for a new semester, but they're a part of the spectrum that we need to not overlook amid the broader discussion of news and faking it. That's the Washington Post above, from Jan. 18, 2016,* and the Washington Times, below, from July 9.

The Times has slightly the worse of it, both on general suckerhood and on syntax:

If luck be a lady tonight in the $540 million Mega Millions lottery, she very well could appear at the Tenley Market on Wisconsin Avenue in Northwest Washington.


And then again, she might not. But the larger problem is that some of the most dangerous forms of fake news are self-inflicted. The lottery story is a persistent example. It's not a partisan affliction, and the Russians aren't pumping it into our water supply to sap our precious bodily fluids. News organizations do it to themselves, and they're the ones who can stop doing it to themselves. File with Bigfoot; tell him his poetry smells and kick him downstairs.

* Yes I'm aware that the URL and the online hed both say "Sorry, Powerball dreamers: There’s no such thing as a ‘lucky store.'" Let us know how you inferred that from the 1A "numbers don't lie" play, OK?

Pesky signs!

Without looking at the lede -- how many hyphens, and where?

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Today in framing

The evening's No. 2 story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

No documents related to the hacks of the Democratic National Committee emails or Clinton campaign Chair John Podesta’s emails appear to be altered or forged, according to a declassified U.S. intelligence report on alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election released Friday.

Stop press! We'd been waiting to hear those crucial details about the long-awaited intelligence report on ... what's that, grownup news organizations everywhere?

Oh, the Putin bit. Well, Fox is getting to that:

While the report accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering a campaign to influence the U.S. election and hurt Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, it found that the material sent to WikiLeaks did not contain “any evident forgeries.”

That's a relief. I mean, who would have thought ...

The claim that the emails may have been doctored or forged was raised by DNC Interim Chair Donna Brazile in October, when she was criticized for an email that surfaced in hacked messages from Podesta’s account.

The report also concluded that Moscow chose WikiLeaks to distribute the information “because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity.”

While the report does not specifically mention Podesta’s emails, it does say Russian intelligence agencies relayed material to WikiLeaks “from the DNC and senior Democratic officials.” Podesta was the most prominent Democratic official to be subject to a cyberattack during the campaign.

Which makes perfect sense if you're the sort of (ahem) viewer whose lead story in late October looked like this:

Because why would you care what the Russians did? Your big story is that CROOKID HILLARY got a boost from the communist media, and it was all rigged against Trump after all. Donna is a household name for you, because Valerie and Huma and Blumenthal are household names for you, and now they've been caught:
The Brazile email passed on a question to campaign adviser Jennifer Palmieri about the death penalty, under the subject line: “From time to time I get questions in advance.”

The exchange came right before a March town hall hosted by CNN and TV One, where a similar question was asked. Yet Brazile denied receiving questions from CNN, and implies that the emails released were doctored.

Got her at last!

After all, as Richard Hofstadter put it, "History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power":

I mean, who cares about Putin when your side has taken down the real Evil Empire?

Charge for the ... wait, what?

"Fake news" (the real thing, not the stuff about the pizza parlor*) works because of the kind of context that makes news in general work. Information has to become a story to become news. Making up the information is generally not that effective, and it's often easy to spot. Making up the context -- making a story mean something that slips past the sometimes drowsy guards of the poor human brain -- is the better way to do real damage. So while you're restocking the survival bunker with ammunition and freeze-dried food at the thought of World War III, let's enjoy the miracle of a well-honed Drudge fake.

Start with the image, which is certainly real (here's what it looked like at the RealClear site in 2013). It started the morning at Drudge doing something else (right): reminding us that the Kenyan and his mooching family** are planning to fritter away some more of your tax money on food and scary music. Soon, thanks to Mr. Murdoch's bestselling London tabloid, the photo took on its new meaning. Take it away, The Sun:

PRESIDENT Obama has deployed US special forces troops along Lithuania’s border with “aggressive” Russia.

Tensions between Washington and the Kremlin have reached Cold War levels amid reports Vladimir Putin is deploying nuke-ready missiles in the Russian province of Kaliningrad – which borders Poland, Belarus and Lithuania.

Geographically challenged, but otherwise not untrue so far.*** Spotted the fakery yet?

And Lithuanian Defence Ministry spokeswoman Asta Galdikaite confirmed America has offered additional military support following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

... She added: “US Special Operations Forces presence in Lithuania is one of the deterrents” against military threats by Putin’s aggressive regime, reports the Express.

US military chief General Raymond T Thomas told the New York Times that America has a “persistent” presence in the Baltic states bordering Russia.

... The US and its Nato allies will send battalions of up to 1,200 to each of the three Baltic states – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – and Poland by spring this year, reports the New York Times.

If "persistent" set your bullshit buzzer off, here's a detail from the Times's Sunday story:
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Four legs good, two legs better

Stop press! We're leading with Hannity's exclusive:

Damning emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman did not come from Russian hackers and the claim is being made to "delegitimize" Donald Trump, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Fox News' Sean Hannity in an exclusive interview.

Hannity sat down with Assange in London's Ecuadorian embassy, where the Australian native has been holed up for five years battling extradition to Sweden on unrelated charges. Part I of the interview is set to air Tuesday night at 10 p.m. on Fox News Channel's "Hannity." 

That'll show the hysterical liberal media, huh?

In excerpts released prior to airing, Assange is adamant that the hacked emails his organization released of Clinton official John Podesta did not come from Russia, as the Obama administration has claimed.

“We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party,” Assange said. 

Which, you have to admit, takes some of the exclusive out of "exclusive." Here's Fox from Nov. 3:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange insisted that the thousands of emails from Hillary Clinton, her State Department staff, close allies and the Democratic Party that the website has published didn’t come from the Russian government.

... “The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,” Assange said. “Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That’s false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.”

He does seem to be pretty consistent about it -- the Russian government wasn't the source. Whether they came from Russia or not seems to be a different question, but regardless, it's enough for Hannity:

Hannity told Fox News' Bill Hemmer "I believe everything (Assange) said," and praised the Internet activist for his commitment to government transparency. 

That has to be a relief, considering ... what's that, Fox News national security analyst (and Trump appointee) K.T. McFarland?

On Monday, Attorney General Holder proudly announced the U.S. government had shut down websites that sold pirated luxury goods or shared videos and songs. But shutting down a website that offers pirated secret government documents and damages United States' security? Not a chance.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange isn’t some well-meaning, anti-war protestor leaking documents in hopes of ending an unpopular war. He’s waging cyberwar on the United States and the global world order.

Mr. Assange and his fellow hackers are terrorists and should be prosecuted as such.

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Who loves you, Bibi?

Pesky police! Proceeding with their probe even though everyone knows it's without merit:

Israeli police on Monday questioned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about a pair of allegations related to possible corruption, FoxNews.com confirmed.

The investigation -- which Netanyahu has called "baseless" -- will address the suspicion that Netanyahu and his family received gifts from Israeli and foreign businessmen in breach of his role as a public servant.

Imagine how Fox would respond if the American cops dared to ... oh, wait:

Hillary Clinton for months has downplayed the FBI investigation into her private email server and practices as a mere “security inquiry.”

But when asked Wednesday by Fox News about Clinton's characterization of the bureau's probe, FBI Director James Comey said he doesn’t know what "security inquiry" means -- adding, “We’re conducting an investigation. … That’s what we do.”

Questions?