Hold it. Hold it. Let me get this straight. There is someone who is actually named “Trashelle”? Trash-elle? Really? 🤭
Anyway, that impromptu Harris news conference on the tarmac was disgraceful. How stupid can a reporter get? News conferences are meaningless now. The questions are shallow, race horse stuff, and evidence no preparation by the reporters. Unless there’s a breaking news situation, I can do without them. Investigative journalism is important, if the editors will run with the resulting stories. (I’m still waiting to hear more about the $10k the Egyptians slipped to the fat boy.)
Ditto about "Trashelle" -- and she's the wife of a construction exec/GOP donor in *Idaho*. I wonder what her parents were thinking. Or maybe she named herself?
My nurse daughter worked in children’s hospital. What people name little helpless babies is unreal. Some should be criminal. Trash was one. Pronounced Tra sha. Yep, some parents are trashy
People who want something different, unique and don’t give a crap about how it will play in Peoria. Then there is my momma. I never asked her, don’t know why…
Most "reporters" are idiots. No training. It's disappointing. It's "gotcha" bullshit. There are still some real newspaper men and women in smaller communities but they're dying out.
Well, sadly the going high honestly hasnt worked too well the past 7 or 8 years. I get what Michelle Obama was saying but dealing with the current crop of MAGAs? It just doesnt work. But ignoring them sure does seem to really piss them off, doesnt it?
Mocking or just noticing that her first and last names together are strikingly awful. When I read them I got a sinking sensation for the child she was who had to carry that. Whoever named her made a cruel mistake.
Thank you, Tom for another excellent column. I liked your statement that there is no pro-Democracy reason for Kamala (or any other Democrat for that matter) to grant an interview with mainstream media. One thing I'd like to remind everyone, the trumpster/dumpster DID NOT win the 2016 election. He lost by two million or so votes. The presidency was handed to him by the MINORITY courtesy of the useless electoral college. With sufficient dishonesty among the State legislatures this could happen again.
to call the electoral college "useless" is to diminish its power. anything that has the power to throw an election so that the loser wins is a lot worse than just "useless" (it was very, very useful to TFF and Bush Jr.). how about we call it "evil?"
Ok, evil it is. The funny thing is the framers of the Constitution put it in because they were afraid the majority would subjugate the minority - instead the result is the exact opposite the thoroughly rotten minority is subjugating the majority.
Best thing you have written!! And so true. Fuck the media. Not that she would get it, but I sent a message to Harris via the WH contact page today. I said you don't have to do ANY interviews with the media. Keep talking to the voters who will vote! Apparently Trump had another "press conference" today and again went off the rails. Although not on Twitter, I can read the last three or four tweets of anyone I Google. Tom Nichols does a play by play, and his comments are devastating about Trump. Nichols said he wished Trump would do a presser every day that citizens saw because Trump really is nuts. As to Lewandowski, this tells us how scared Trump is because he's bringing back the old crazy crew. Lewandowski is a sexual predator bully - just like Trump. I hope this blows up in their faces.
Oh, one more thing. My husband started out as a sports writer at a local paper in the early 70's. He progressed to radio and then television advertising. From there he was with an advertising agency, starting his own in 2010. He retired last year. Friends told him after Sinclair bought the CBS affiliate, they were required to run pro-Trump, right wing bullshit. They all have an angle now. Worse, they're stupid.
This is a GREAT idea! I am going to follow your lead and send Harris a message to amplify yours. She doesn't need to waste one minute of her time with the press.
Damn straight. Honestly I think the majority of us women have had enough. I also believe Harris/Walz will win. But Trump/Maga will scream stolen and there will be violence which we will put down. Fuck these people.
Before the VP was announced, I was sure that the Project 2025 / Heritage Foundation people were going to hand-pick a running mate with exactly that scenario in mind. But no way would they have picked JD Vance -- they may be evil but they're not that stupid. Supposedly Vance was Don Jr.'s idea. That sounds about right, though maybe Peter Thiel had a hand in it somehow.
The 2025ers and techcsars will induce the Cabinet and Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment and may even use videos of Trump's press conferences and campaign rallies to bolster their argument for going 25-A. I'm sure many of them have been thinking about it all along. It'll be a contest to see who gets turned into roadkill under the bus first. Sending Trump a copy of Shake's "Julius Caesar," which he will take as a compliment rather than a warning, I'm sure.
I have a strong suspicion that when Trump replied to his advisor’s attempt to rein in his demeaning attacks upon Harris that ‘I know what I am doing’, that both he and Vance have decided to double down on fanning the flames of misogyny and racism in their MAGA voting base.
Yes. He will not be alone in the pre planning of further civilian terror in order to create social chaos as cover for a political power grab to economically monopolise the common good for the morbidly wealthy few.
So I’ve actually been wondering if Trump is trying to lose the election so he can rile up discontent. Keeping people pissed off is easier than trying to, you know, run a country.
I know what you're saying, but I think the actual truth is a lot simpler (just as TFF is actually very simple in his needs). he wants to be the most powerful and famous person in the world. it's his birthright, etc. yada yada yada.
and now that he's spent time with the NYT covering HIM every day, he experiences losing that as losing pretty much everything. he's not that complicated.
In addition to describing them perfect as otherwise unemployable morons, it's worth remembering that even if the ownership is pro-Potbelly, the "reporters" are for whatever is clickbait and gets them time on TV (including alleged reporters for newspapers). They really don't understand that Harris and Walz do more for them in that regard than Pol Potbelly and Sofa Loren.
That was a great piece Tom, one of your best. MSM with the exception of MSNBC is promoting the insipid orange turd virtually non stop, and even the only network that I will watch is showing his face 50 x more than I am comfortable seeing it, I loathe that bastard at a cellular level. Kamala should tell the worthless MSM that she will get around to wasting time with them when she’s finished communicating with the people who are voters, so don’t hold your breath because it could be a while, otherwise they can report all they want about her rallies, which if they were to listen gives them plenty to write or talk about. 💥
Ok. So what do you guys think about a Harris Trump debate? I know she’s 1000 times smarter and more articulate than he is BUT the way debates are not moderated or fact checked, Trump will just go off the rails and they will let him “for ratings” . He won’t be held accountable for the lies he spews and he’ll get lots of sound bits and a gold star for “owning the libs.”. Debates are a fucking joke right now. I don’t think Harris should go near a stage with Trump present.
I can see Harris pinch-hitting as moderator if the moderator(s) don't do their job, and I can also see Trump either exploding or melting down into a puddle if she checks him. He's scared to death of her, and she can run circles around him. It could be a replay of the NABJ interview.
I agree, she'll fact check him in real time and he won't know how to handle it. His campaign can't control him now, and he will be off the rails during a debate.
Another classic post. This is the greatest takedown of our corrupt, fascist media I’ve ever read.
This one reminds me of a Lewis Lapham footnote about the 1776 revolutionary pamphleteer Tom Paine from his great book The Age of Folly: “Some years ago in its editorial page,” writes Lapham, “The New York times handed down the ruling that ‘ great publications magnify beyond measure the voice of any single writer. The sentence employed the wrong verb. The instruments of the media amplify a voice, serving much the same purpose as the loudspeakers in a ballpark or a prison. What magnifies a voice is the force of mind and its power of expression, which is why Shakespeare’s plays still draw a crowd in Central Park.” Thanks for “magnifying” the truth about the issue of our national “presscorpse.”
Thanks for the great insights about the MSM., Tom. I love how Harris stepped up to engage voters, and is working hard to communicate directly to them, not thru the media. So much of this election has upended the way politics has run for the past 50 years. Gives me great hope for America's future.
TC, you wrote: "The good news in all the MAGA nostalgia for a past that never was is that a significant proportion of the MAGA Baby Boomer(s)...are no longer around to lower the national IQ as they did in 2016 and 2020. I read recently that something around half of the Class of ‘62 are no longer here."
I remember wondering during the Pandemic when these folks were attending super spreader events, refusing to wear masks, refusing to get vaccinated, and - no doubt - following the advice of their dear leader and trying out the bleach remedy, how many would still be around in 2024. Remember when Herman Cain attended that super spreader rally, contracted Covid and died from it? That's when I began to think of an entire generation of idiots who were destined for a quick trip to the morgue due to their political beliefs.
The numbers of deaths per capita were much higher in red states than blue states. And the "leading edge" baby boomers are the age to have been at significant risk during the pandemic.
I’m of an age to have been at significant risk during the pandemic, and I’m in a red state. But I’m blue through and through. Hope to live to cast one more vote.
If media’s job is to tell the public what just happened—meaning the most important points of what took place with regard to the contest for the Presidency—and they become biased and have an agenda of their own that is at odds with telling the public the flat out truth, I see it as the candidate’s duty to the citizens and democracy to pole vault over these phony media and actively SHOW people what is happening live in person as Kamala Harris is demonstrating now. Word of mouth and the Substack writers I subscribe to are backing this powerful idea up daily. They’re making news reporting honorable again. May their readership keep growing by leaps and bounds.
Love this: "The media just got put in their place by the Harris-Walz. The campaign’s priority is speaking directly to the voters, not through an intermediary. And certainly not through a bad intermediary with an agenda who has their thumb on the scale to advance the interests of their owners."
The media are *supposed* to be an interMEDIAry, finding, transmitting, and interpreting news for all of us who don't have their access, but they've been blowing it for years, and the D.C. press corps(e) is the worst.
What happened to Jim Acosta? He impressed me once upon a time as a man who pushed back on idiots. What happened to Frank Luntz? He impressed me as a Republican sycophant and word smith who did his best to make W palpable to the masses. The remote is necessary when watching anything. Zip tolerance for what the “free press” has become.
I'm Class of 1958 myself, but then Mom went to 99, and her mother went to 97, so I may be playing better odds..... I think that what we are seeing today in the Democratic campaign is an alignment of the stars that is not that common, a juxtaposition of talent and opportunity that meshes to produce a force of nature that is almost impossible to stop. Trump is constitutionally incapable of changing his spots and will lose broadly and deeply if the campaign continues on this track. My hope is that Trump's flailing and the Republicans' poor policies will result in a rout that delivers the whole ball of wax into Kamala Harris's hands - White House, House and Senate. And then, a new Democratic class of leaders who will use that political power to reform the country as it needs to be reformed. If we can do that, we CAN have the country we want, the one FDR envisioned so many years ago. About time.....
Hold it. Hold it. Let me get this straight. There is someone who is actually named “Trashelle”? Trash-elle? Really? 🤭
Anyway, that impromptu Harris news conference on the tarmac was disgraceful. How stupid can a reporter get? News conferences are meaningless now. The questions are shallow, race horse stuff, and evidence no preparation by the reporters. Unless there’s a breaking news situation, I can do without them. Investigative journalism is important, if the editors will run with the resulting stories. (I’m still waiting to hear more about the $10k the Egyptians slipped to the fat boy.)
Yeah, me, too, about that $10million!!
Ditto about "Trashelle" -- and she's the wife of a construction exec/GOP donor in *Idaho*. I wonder what her parents were thinking. Or maybe she named herself?
My nurse daughter worked in children’s hospital. What people name little helpless babies is unreal. Some should be criminal. Trash was one. Pronounced Tra sha. Yep, some parents are trashy
Maybe those parents liked the way it sounded -- but did they think what it would look like written down? Maybe not.
People who want something different, unique and don’t give a crap about how it will play in Peoria. Then there is my momma. I never asked her, don’t know why…
Most "reporters" are idiots. No training. It's disappointing. It's "gotcha" bullshit. There are still some real newspaper men and women in smaller communities but they're dying out.
Let's not behave like TFG by mocking someone's name. I get it's unusual, but we can be better than this. "When they go low, we go high".
Well, sadly the going high honestly hasnt worked too well the past 7 or 8 years. I get what Michelle Obama was saying but dealing with the current crop of MAGAs? It just doesnt work. But ignoring them sure does seem to really piss them off, doesnt it?
yep, he hates not being the center of attention!
Mocking or just noticing that her first and last names together are strikingly awful. When I read them I got a sinking sensation for the child she was who had to carry that. Whoever named her made a cruel mistake.
Thank you, Tom for another excellent column. I liked your statement that there is no pro-Democracy reason for Kamala (or any other Democrat for that matter) to grant an interview with mainstream media. One thing I'd like to remind everyone, the trumpster/dumpster DID NOT win the 2016 election. He lost by two million or so votes. The presidency was handed to him by the MINORITY courtesy of the useless electoral college. With sufficient dishonesty among the State legislatures this could happen again.
to call the electoral college "useless" is to diminish its power. anything that has the power to throw an election so that the loser wins is a lot worse than just "useless" (it was very, very useful to TFF and Bush Jr.). how about we call it "evil?"
Ok, evil it is. The funny thing is the framers of the Constitution put it in because they were afraid the majority would subjugate the minority - instead the result is the exact opposite the thoroughly rotten minority is subjugating the majority.
Best thing you have written!! And so true. Fuck the media. Not that she would get it, but I sent a message to Harris via the WH contact page today. I said you don't have to do ANY interviews with the media. Keep talking to the voters who will vote! Apparently Trump had another "press conference" today and again went off the rails. Although not on Twitter, I can read the last three or four tweets of anyone I Google. Tom Nichols does a play by play, and his comments are devastating about Trump. Nichols said he wished Trump would do a presser every day that citizens saw because Trump really is nuts. As to Lewandowski, this tells us how scared Trump is because he's bringing back the old crazy crew. Lewandowski is a sexual predator bully - just like Trump. I hope this blows up in their faces.
Oh, one more thing. My husband started out as a sports writer at a local paper in the early 70's. He progressed to radio and then television advertising. From there he was with an advertising agency, starting his own in 2010. He retired last year. Friends told him after Sinclair bought the CBS affiliate, they were required to run pro-Trump, right wing bullshit. They all have an angle now. Worse, they're stupid.
Sinclair is anything but journalism. Goebbels on steroids
This is a GREAT idea! I am going to follow your lead and send Harris a message to amplify yours. She doesn't need to waste one minute of her time with the press.
My cousin sent me this link - does show the difference in more people's thinking!
https://x.com/dom_lucre/status/1823894751914934503
Us post menopausal women are just tickled to be relegated to the title of nanny.
This post menopausal woman would like to kick JD Vance in the nuts, if he has any.
Can I help you Rita! ? My fear right now, if trump wins, the Project 2025 folks to force trump out and then we have Vance!
Damn straight. Honestly I think the majority of us women have had enough. I also believe Harris/Walz will win. But Trump/Maga will scream stolen and there will be violence which we will put down. Fuck these people.
Yes indeed! I'm so glad you joined us, Rita.
I'm happy to be here!
exactly what I'm anticipating.
and this anticipation really SUCKS.
Before the VP was announced, I was sure that the Project 2025 / Heritage Foundation people were going to hand-pick a running mate with exactly that scenario in mind. But no way would they have picked JD Vance -- they may be evil but they're not that stupid. Supposedly Vance was Don Jr.'s idea. That sounds about right, though maybe Peter Thiel had a hand in it somehow.
Yep, what I thought too
The 2025ers and techcsars will induce the Cabinet and Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment and may even use videos of Trump's press conferences and campaign rallies to bolster their argument for going 25-A. I'm sure many of them have been thinking about it all along. It'll be a contest to see who gets turned into roadkill under the bus first. Sending Trump a copy of Shake's "Julius Caesar," which he will take as a compliment rather than a warning, I'm sure.
I have a strong suspicion that when Trump replied to his advisor’s attempt to rein in his demeaning attacks upon Harris that ‘I know what I am doing’, that both he and Vance have decided to double down on fanning the flames of misogyny and racism in their MAGA voting base.
I also suspect he's got some nefarious plot brewing to create civil disturbance when he loses this election.
Yes. He will not be alone in the pre planning of further civilian terror in order to create social chaos as cover for a political power grab to economically monopolise the common good for the morbidly wealthy few.
If he has any, alright. 💥
So I’ve actually been wondering if Trump is trying to lose the election so he can rile up discontent. Keeping people pissed off is easier than trying to, you know, run a country.
I know what you're saying, but I think the actual truth is a lot simpler (just as TFF is actually very simple in his needs). he wants to be the most powerful and famous person in the world. it's his birthright, etc. yada yada yada.
and now that he's spent time with the NYT covering HIM every day, he experiences losing that as losing pretty much everything. he's not that complicated.
I share your belief
He need to stay out of jail…
In addition to describing them perfect as otherwise unemployable morons, it's worth remembering that even if the ownership is pro-Potbelly, the "reporters" are for whatever is clickbait and gets them time on TV (including alleged reporters for newspapers). They really don't understand that Harris and Walz do more for them in that regard than Pol Potbelly and Sofa Loren.
That was a great piece Tom, one of your best. MSM with the exception of MSNBC is promoting the insipid orange turd virtually non stop, and even the only network that I will watch is showing his face 50 x more than I am comfortable seeing it, I loathe that bastard at a cellular level. Kamala should tell the worthless MSM that she will get around to wasting time with them when she’s finished communicating with the people who are voters, so don’t hold your breath because it could be a while, otherwise they can report all they want about her rallies, which if they were to listen gives them plenty to write or talk about. 💥
Ok. So what do you guys think about a Harris Trump debate? I know she’s 1000 times smarter and more articulate than he is BUT the way debates are not moderated or fact checked, Trump will just go off the rails and they will let him “for ratings” . He won’t be held accountable for the lies he spews and he’ll get lots of sound bits and a gold star for “owning the libs.”. Debates are a fucking joke right now. I don’t think Harris should go near a stage with Trump present.
I can see Harris pinch-hitting as moderator if the moderator(s) don't do their job, and I can also see Trump either exploding or melting down into a puddle if she checks him. He's scared to death of her, and she can run circles around him. It could be a replay of the NABJ interview.
I agree, she'll fact check him in real time and he won't know how to handle it. His campaign can't control him now, and he will be off the rails during a debate.
I really think he will find some excuse or way out of an actual debate - UNLESS its on faux. I agree hes scared to death of Harris AND Walz.
if I'd read your comment before I posted mine, I would have realized I didn't need to.
Another classic post. This is the greatest takedown of our corrupt, fascist media I’ve ever read.
This one reminds me of a Lewis Lapham footnote about the 1776 revolutionary pamphleteer Tom Paine from his great book The Age of Folly: “Some years ago in its editorial page,” writes Lapham, “The New York times handed down the ruling that ‘ great publications magnify beyond measure the voice of any single writer. The sentence employed the wrong verb. The instruments of the media amplify a voice, serving much the same purpose as the loudspeakers in a ballpark or a prison. What magnifies a voice is the force of mind and its power of expression, which is why Shakespeare’s plays still draw a crowd in Central Park.” Thanks for “magnifying” the truth about the issue of our national “presscorpse.”
Thanks for the great insights about the MSM., Tom. I love how Harris stepped up to engage voters, and is working hard to communicate directly to them, not thru the media. So much of this election has upended the way politics has run for the past 50 years. Gives me great hope for America's future.
TC, you wrote: "The good news in all the MAGA nostalgia for a past that never was is that a significant proportion of the MAGA Baby Boomer(s)...are no longer around to lower the national IQ as they did in 2016 and 2020. I read recently that something around half of the Class of ‘62 are no longer here."
I remember wondering during the Pandemic when these folks were attending super spreader events, refusing to wear masks, refusing to get vaccinated, and - no doubt - following the advice of their dear leader and trying out the bleach remedy, how many would still be around in 2024. Remember when Herman Cain attended that super spreader rally, contracted Covid and died from it? That's when I began to think of an entire generation of idiots who were destined for a quick trip to the morgue due to their political beliefs.
The numbers of deaths per capita were much higher in red states than blue states. And the "leading edge" baby boomers are the age to have been at significant risk during the pandemic.
I’m of an age to have been at significant risk during the pandemic, and I’m in a red state. But I’m blue through and through. Hope to live to cast one more vote.
Let’s just make them irrelevant.
If media’s job is to tell the public what just happened—meaning the most important points of what took place with regard to the contest for the Presidency—and they become biased and have an agenda of their own that is at odds with telling the public the flat out truth, I see it as the candidate’s duty to the citizens and democracy to pole vault over these phony media and actively SHOW people what is happening live in person as Kamala Harris is demonstrating now. Word of mouth and the Substack writers I subscribe to are backing this powerful idea up daily. They’re making news reporting honorable again. May their readership keep growing by leaps and bounds.
That’s Another Fine Mess - TCinLA
Lucian K. Truscott Newsletter
The Good in Us - Mary Trump
Civil Discourse - Joyce Vance
Today’s Edition Newsletter -
Robert B Hubbell
The Status Kuo - Jay Kuo
Letters from an American -
Heather Cox Richardson
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
America America
Rick Wilson’s Substack
Popular Information - Judd Legum
Everyone is Entitled to My Own
Opinion - Jeff Tiedrich
Thinking About… Timothy Snyder
Hopium Chronicles- Simon Rosenberg
Michael Moore
The Dworkin Report
The Big Picture
Love this: "The media just got put in their place by the Harris-Walz. The campaign’s priority is speaking directly to the voters, not through an intermediary. And certainly not through a bad intermediary with an agenda who has their thumb on the scale to advance the interests of their owners."
The media are *supposed* to be an interMEDIAry, finding, transmitting, and interpreting news for all of us who don't have their access, but they've been blowing it for years, and the D.C. press corps(e) is the worst.
You need a copy editor.
We’re all imperfect, Kent.
I was giving Tom the needle. Humor is lost in the interboobs.
Oh, I lol'ed when I read your comment, Kent. TC's articles are rife with typos sometime, but other times are prefect.
What happened to Jim Acosta? He impressed me once upon a time as a man who pushed back on idiots. What happened to Frank Luntz? He impressed me as a Republican sycophant and word smith who did his best to make W palpable to the masses. The remote is necessary when watching anything. Zip tolerance for what the “free press” has become.
Acosta is actually not one of the "problems." He's been "fair and balanced."
Glad to hear it.
I'm Class of 1958 myself, but then Mom went to 99, and her mother went to 97, so I may be playing better odds..... I think that what we are seeing today in the Democratic campaign is an alignment of the stars that is not that common, a juxtaposition of talent and opportunity that meshes to produce a force of nature that is almost impossible to stop. Trump is constitutionally incapable of changing his spots and will lose broadly and deeply if the campaign continues on this track. My hope is that Trump's flailing and the Republicans' poor policies will result in a rout that delivers the whole ball of wax into Kamala Harris's hands - White House, House and Senate. And then, a new Democratic class of leaders who will use that political power to reform the country as it needs to be reformed. If we can do that, we CAN have the country we want, the one FDR envisioned so many years ago. About time.....
They cheat, assume nothing