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Severed Heads Leap From Dufflebag Today Michael Cohen dropped the dufflebag he'd been carrying for Donald Trump for ten years and a collection of severed heads fell out, one of which spoke the following words: "...and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office." The severed head was implicating Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States. And somewhere not too far away, Paul Manafort sits contemplating what life in a solitary prison cell might feel like for the rest of his life. In the fiefdoms of Townhall dot com and Breitbart, the circular firing squad has begun. Kurt Slichter is strangely silent on his Facebook page but on Townhall he is exhorting his faithful readers to set fire to their Michael Cohen Beanie Babies and blame the "radical Demosocialists" because Obama and Hillary are the real criminals and we must think of those poor raped babies in that pizzeria basement somewhere. Trump will most likely resign because the noose...
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Liberals Already Had Their Trump Moment... And it all boils down to perception and ratings. You know, liberals seem to make better policy wonks than other folks more often than not. Well, policy wonks work their tails off, they hit all the right moral and ethical notes, they don't believe in hurting large groups of people to achieve a singular beneficial end for a tiny entrenched group of wealthy oligarchs, and they don't try to dodge tough questions by perching on shifting relativistic arguments. What's right is right. They are also BORING AS HELL on 24 hour cable TV news segments and they don't like talking in sound bites. If you present tough, complicated questions, they're bound to give you tough, complicated answers and offer complicated solutions, which might be very sound, but again... BOR-R-R-R-R-R-R-ING~!!! And cable TV news cannot ever afford to be boring. Know what's not boring? You guessed it, the clowns, the extremists, the revanchists, th...
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TV News as a Consumer Product I was asked by several people to post this here, it's a conglomeration or maybe distillation of several posts I made in another thread, but it turns out it seems to belong here. It seems a couple of folks mentioned Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, and while not everyone liked them, a few said that they were "real journalists". TV news was still second banana to newspapers back then. It's different now. Television news back then was governed under two agreements, one of which was the law. The Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to allow time for reasonable opposing viewpoints on a story if the report took a slanted or partial view, thus reporters, editors and anchors went to great lengths to present news in an unbiased, objective and impartial manner, and editorials were clearly labeled as such. The other agreement was not law but, due to the Fairness Doctrine, networks and stations had a gentleman's agreement to allow their n...
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What IS a Constitutional Crisis? The phrase "constitutional crisis" isn't a legal term at all, but it does serve to describe several well known and acknowledged types of government, legal, national security and executive emergencies. But in the end, wouldn't it be fair to say that "constitutional crisis" means to the Constitution what "psychotic lapse" means to mental illness? Even a seasoned medical professional might struggle a bit to lay out the specific set of morbidities that clearly define such a lapse but they can certainly tell one when they see one. If congressional Republicans fail to hold Trump accountable for firing Mueller, I daresay that would accurately describe a crisis of fidelity, but it would naturally follow that if we are in a crisis of fidelity, then we must by necessity also be in a concomitant operational crisis, because the former paints us into the corner where we are confounded by the latter, thus the two are insepa...
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