Trump Changes His Mind--Again

Dan is rather surprised:



It sounds like Trump changed his mind again by denying the report.


As much as I dislike Trump, I don't want him removed from office or be forced to resign, at least not yet. After reading "Democracy in Chains," the major GOP apparatus would have to go first since they are largely bought off by the crackpot Charles Koch and his cohorts with their extreme anti-democracy beliefs. We would REALLY have a problem if Pence or Ryan were in charge.

He's Crazy

There is no other word for it, and it won't get better in D.C. because of it. Dan Rather's FB post:





Case in point:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

Shit Just Keeps Hitting the Fan

Dan Rather:







Peter Daou, who is much younger than Rather, does not truly understand the import of Watergate:




Watergate does not "pale" in comparison except by those who do not understand what Watergate was all about. Hundreds of thousands of people died in southeast Asia simply because Richard Nixon wanted to get elected and re-elected and was willing to commit what amounted to treason to get it. Nixon was the absolute worst president in American history. Trump is nowhere near on that level yet. Stupidest president? Yes. Most incompetent? Yes. Most like a puppet of a foreign government? Yes. But not on Nixon's level of evil.

This administration is more like Warren Harding's--on steroids.

The only thing missing is Nan Britton.

Can This Administration Be Saved?

Of course, it SHOULDN'T, but can it?



This is good to know:

As special counsel, Mueller will be given civil service protections; won't be able to be removed by the president, @stevenportnoy reports. pic.twitter.com/neyEkaspOM

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 17, 2017

I think it doesn't matter if Trump is gone because there is terminal rot all down the line since the GOP controls all three branches of government.

I'll believe a resignation when I see it.

I Agree With Dan About the Importance of a Free Press,

but it was the media in general, and CNN in particular thanks to head Jeff Zucker's relationship with Donald Trump, that has gotten us into the mess we have been in. The 24/7 fawning coverage of Trump during the primaries was completely unprecedented in American history. It was done as a cynical grab for ratings and bottom line.

An Eventful Week,

and not in a good way, as Dan Rather notes, but things have been overshadowed by the Bill O'Reilly firing--long overdue--and the election in Georgia last night:





O'Reilly got shitcanned because of several sexual harassment claims against him, and these and similar allegations have dogged him for many years.

O'Reilly didn't start out so bad. He had once been a high school teacher, albeit at a private school, before turning to journalism. Unlike many commentators, he actually was a journalist who started out with local CBS stations, I believe. However, he went on to work as the original host of the television tabloid/news program Inside Edition. This was when I was first familiar with O'Reilly. I watched him nightly on this program. He generally played it straight and didn't interject his opinion on reports. By the mid-1990s, he decided to go back to school and attended Harvard, ultimately getting his master's degree in public administration. Also around this time, Fox, Murdoch, or Ailes approached O'Reilly and offered him a plum job as a host of a talking head program. O'Reilly knew which side his bread was buttered on, so he took it, and the rest is history, or infamy, as it ultimately turned out.

Details on the O'Reilly firing:

Mr. O’Reilly is departing two and a half weeks after an investigation by The New York Times revealed how Fox News and 21st Century Fox had repeatedly stood by him even as sexual harassment allegations against him mounted. The Times found that the company and Mr. O’Reilly had reached settlements with five women who had complained about sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by him. The agreements totaled about $13 million.

Since then, more than 50 advertisers had abandoned his show, and women’s rights groups had called for his ouster. Inside the company, women expressed outrage and questioned whether top executives were serious about maintaining a culture based on “trust and respect,” as they had promised last summer when another sexual harassment scandal led to the ouster of Roger E. Ailes as chairman of Fox News.

It didn't make sense to ditch Ailes yet keep O'Reilly around.

I don't think he will starve to death. Somebody in another network might actually pick him up.

Possibly he will turn to writing full-time. He already has a bunch of (probably bulk-bought) bestselling books.

Dan Rather Has Never Seen Anything Like What is Going on With Trump

Probably nobody has. The news gets more and more depressing by the day.

The FBI Investigation is Truly Bad Shit

Dan Rather elaborates:

Easier Said Than Done, GOP

These idiots want to repeal "Obamacare," but it ain't that easy:

Dan Rather Writes About Trump's Latest Paranoid Rants

Trump Channeled His Inner Idi

Dan Rather noted how utterly bizarre Trump's press conference of yesterday was:



And of course the printed word doesn't do justice to actually watching the madman at work:

"He Was at Least AWOL"

Dan Rather talks about his new book and the Bush National Guard story:

Was Dan Rather Right?

Of course. The Bush National Guard story was true, and those Killian memos were certainly real:

The first person to publicly question the memos was an Air Force officer in Montgomery named Paul Boley, who posted on the conservative online forum Free Republic under the handle TankerKC. Boley’s comment popped up while the program was still going on.

But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night. He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn’t exist on typewriters of the early seventies.

A conspiracy theory has since arisen that Bartlett, knowing in advance that the documents were forgeries—and, in some fevered imaginations, knowing his boss Karl Rove was the source of them—tipped off right-wing surrogates to attack the documents.

When I asked Lloyd why Bartlett ignored his assessment, he said, “I guess he was trying to set Rather up for getting mauled.”

Bartlett told me that the online attacks began “before I started any outreach” to the press. He added that Bush himself didn’t learn of the Killian memos until after the segment had already aired, because Bartlett felt the documents didn’t show anything revelatory. He initially dismissed them as “old news.”
In any case, MacDougald’s arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, “It’s ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it’s really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn’t seem as though they would hold up.”

Anybody who would believe a poster from Free Republic who would come up with a pile of shit like that should have his or her head examined. Anybody who worked as a goddamned typist would have told this idiot the spacing was typical of typewriters. I couldn't believe the shit being spewed that somehow a word processing program could possibly imitate a typewriter.

This is an extremely long article, but it is worth reading.

News

Dan Rather lost his case on appeal today.
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Ted Olson, Mr. VRWC himself, goes out on a limb in trying to make a "conservative" case for same-sex marriage.

He and attorney David Boies, both of them the principal lawyers in the case which all but ruined a nation, Bush v. Gore, are trying to overturn Proposition 8 by using the court system and thus invite HUGE backlash from millions of people.
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This kid needed serious counseling instead of surgical mutilation in order to be a "girl," which of course he is not and never will be.

After all, what defines one as male or female isn't about sex roles or wearing clothes but rather about reproduction, regardless of whether one can or wants to have children. "Trans" people are not the opposite sex they covet; they are what they are biologically. These people are basically living out a fantasy which is also a lie.

It's sad, but that's what "transgendered" people are. They are seriously screwed up people. I don't think it is ethical for doctors to perform surgery in order to treat what is in fact a psychological issue.
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A strong earthquake is expected to cause many casualties in Haiti:

"People are out in the streets, crying, screaming, shouting," said Karel Zelenka, director of the Catholic Relief Services office in Haiti. "They see the extent of the damage," he said, but can do little to rescue people trapped under rubble because night has fallen.

"This will be a major, major disaster," Zelenka said.

He reported that poorly constructed shantytowns and other buildings had collapsed in huge clouds of dust. Near the CRS headquarters, a supermarket was "completely razed," he said, and a gasoline station and a church were reduced to rubble. Among the worst-hit areas was the impoverished Carrefour section of Port-au-Prince near the sea, Zelenka said.

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Oldest living Oscar winner Luise Rainer reached a milestone today as she celebrated her 100th birthday.

She won Best Actress awards for The Good Earth (1937) and The Great Ziegfeld (1936).
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There is no way I am going to buy that bullshit book, Game Change.

It appears to be all sensationalism and gossip, and not a lot of it with sources willing to go on the record.

And it is hitting far below the belt to drag the Edwardses through more shit. Leave them alone:

This is the most revealing aspect of this episode. The National Enquirer, Matt Drudge and Politico aren't aberrational extremes in our press corps. As Halperin and Harris correctly noted in calling Washington journalism "The Freak Show," they are at its epicenter, leading the way. The reason there is such a complete merger of interest among low-life tabloids, Matt Drudge, reality shows and the Washington political press corps is precisely because they are indeed indistinguishable -- merged. Even for people who thought that John Edwards' sexual activities were relevant when he was running for President or vying for a high administration position, at this point he is a completely destroyed, discredited non-entity with no political future, and mucking around in the life of him and his wife is pure sleazy voyeurism. Subjecting the Edwards to this sort of vicious, judgmental scrutiny is a cost-free activity, which is why so many are so eager to engage in it.

It tells me far more about the asshole "reporters" than it does about them.

Still More Outrageous News

Not a surprise that an appeals court has thrown newsman Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS in its entirety.

I wonder who the judges are.

In any case, Rather plans to appeal.

Miscellaneous

Celebrity deaths are supposed to come in threes, not in dozens, as has been the case this past summer.
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CBS was out of luck today in the Dan Rather lawsuit.
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Looking for young pussy, a cat is being blamed for downloading kitty porn, in a case which has created a boatload of bad jokes, including from yours truly.
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Media

More power to Dan Rather if he should prevail against CBS and the awful Leslie Moonves in his lawsuit.

By the way, just because some organized group of freepers "discredited" the TANG report doesn't mean they debunked it. I have maintained all the time the Killian memos were genuine and typed by the man himself.

Miscellaneous News

Today's Obituary: Gidget, the "Taco Bell dog," 15, euthanized after suffering a stroke.
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There are no plans to investigate the allegations of sexual assault against NFL QB Ben Roethlisberger.
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I for one am glad to hear this about Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS.
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Let's hope medical science can help this young woman who suffers from acromeglia.
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Media Follies

It is no surprise at all there was GOP involvement in CBS's dispute with Dan Rather over the Killian memos.

So far, Mr. Rather has spent more than $2 million of his own money on the suit. And according to documents filed recently in court, he may be getting something for his money.

Using tools unavailable to him as a reporter — including the power of subpoena and the threat of punishment against witnesses who lie under oath — he has unearthed evidence that would seem to support his assertion that CBS intended its investigation, at least in part, to quell Republican criticism of the network.

Among the materials that money has shaken free for Mr. Rather are internal CBS memorandums turned over to his lawyers, showing that network executives used Republican operatives to vet the names of potential members of a panel that had been billed as independent and charged with investigating the “60 Minutes” segment.

It was all a big disinformation campaign by the GOP and its bloggers to try and discredit, but not disprove, the authenticity of the memos in order to cast suspicion on the entire TANG report.

And THESE memos are far more interesting than the Killian ones:

Some of the documents unearthed by his investigation include notes taken at the time by Linda Mason, a vice president of CBS News. According to her notes, one potential panel member, Warren Rudman, a former Republican senator from New Hampshire, was deemed a less-than-ideal candidate over fears by some that he would not “mollify the right.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Thornburgh, who served as attorney general for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, was named a panelist by CBS, but only after a CBS lobbyist “did some other testing,” in which she was told, according to Ms. Mason’s notes, “T comes back with high marks from G.O.P.”

Another memorandum turned over to Mr. Rather’s lawyers by CBS was a long typed list of conservative commentators apparently receiving some preliminary consideration as panel members, including Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter and Pat Buchanan. At the bottom of that list, someone had scribbled “Roger Ailes,” the founder of Fox News.

Dan Rather

A judge is allowing Rather's suit against CBS to continue, but he dismissed Rather's claims the network committed fraud and unlawfully interfered with his contract:

But Justice Ira Gammerman allowed Rather to proceed with his claims that CBS broke the terms of his contract and breached its fiduciary duty by sidelining him in the wake of a controversial story about President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

The ruling "allows us to prove everything we need to prove to a jury," said Martin Gold, Rather's lead attorney. "I think the breach-of-contract claim is essentially a slam-dunk."