Author: Doyce

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“Presiding Over the Funeral of Access Journalism

So, yesterday, I wrote:

How about everyone just ignores the White House press room?

Send the AP guy to get a recording, they ship that out to the news agencies and papers, and everyone else just spends their time fact-checking that and reporting on what they ACTUALLY DO and ignoring what they say except as anecdotal filler for the bottom of the column?

Here’s the Washington Post today (emphasis mine):

Official words do matter, but they shouldn’t be what news organizations pay most attention to, as they try to present the truth about a new administration.

White House press briefings are “access journalism,” in which official statements – achieved by closeness to the source – are taken at face value and breathlessly reported as news. And that is over. Dead.

As Jessica Huseman of ProPublica put it: “Journalists aren’t going to get answers from Spicer. We are going to get answers by digging. By getting our hands dirty. So let’s all do that.”

The traditional way of reporting on a president is dead. And Trump’s press secretary killed it.
Sean Spicer’s remarks, full of falsehoods, should inspire journalists to dig into what matters.

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I want you to imagine a different 2009

A 2009 where, mere hours after being sworn in, Obama (let me see if I can remember it all…) imposed both sharia AND martial law, opened FEMA internment camps, instituted mandatory abortions and death panels, wrecked the economy even more than it was, forced us all to get gay married, and confiscated all privately-owned firearms.

Because that's the bullshit people were screaming about, without a shred of evidence, and none of it happened. None of it.

And you say my reaction to Trump is the same.

Except the things I shouted about are things he repeatedly said he was going to do.

The things I am shouting about are what. he. is. doing. now.

That bullshit you fever-dreamed about in 2009?

That's the reality of 2017.

"The white house climate change web page that existed is removed from the Trump site."

"Also gone are the web pages the previous administration had devoted to the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals; people with disabilities; and civil rights more generally."

You voted for Trump?

You voted to poison the planet.

You voted to cook our children and grandchildren in a world you're too lazy to take care of.

You voted for my dad to lose his healthcare because he's been fighting prostate cancer for fifteen years and is about to become 'uninsurable' again.

You voted to take rights and protections away from my family.

If I had a hope in this, it would be only that you never have cause to regret the actions of the man you voted into office.

But I do not have that hope.

I have an enemy.

I have resolve and a renewed will to resist this human stain on the country's legacy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-signs-executive-order-that-could-lift-affordable-care-acts-individual-mandate/2017/01/20/8c99e35e-df70-11e6-b2cf-b67fe3285cbc_story.html

Trump signs executive order that could effectively gut Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate
The order directs all federal agencies to minimize the law’s “economic and regulatory burdens” as felt by consumers, insurers, providers, drug companies and states.

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Surprising No One, Cable Companies Immediately Start Pushing to Repeal Privacy Rules

Information such as your Web browsing history, your geolocation logs and even the content of your emails offer service providers a rich source of potential advertising revenue. That data, along with your health and financial information, can also be sold to marketers and data brokers interested in building a profile of you as a consumer. The FCC's rules restricted Internet providers' ability to use and share this information, in what privacy advocates hailed as a historic victory.

But now the fate of those regulations lies in question as Republicans prepare to take control of the nation's top telecom watchdog. Consumer advocacy groups vowed Wednesday to oppose the cable industry's petition.

YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN REVISITING THIS ARTICLE ON IMPROVING YOUR ONLINE PRIVACY AND SECURITY

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/tor-signal-and-beyond-a-law-abiding-citizens-guide-to-privacy-1a593f2104c3#.wziz8leqe

It’s begun: Cable companies are pushing to repeal Obama-era Internet privacy rules
The industry argues the rules are illegal and unconstitutional.

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Republicans Gut Ethics Body

This is the sort of headline people will look back on in thirty years and say "How very stupid people must have been, back then. How could they not have seen what was going on? Everything was so blatant, so obvious; those senators were acting like villains in really bad b-movie espionage scripts – the kind people poke holes in for being unrealistic."

I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's optimism.

I think it's a misplaced faith in the good of elected leadership (and, come to that, people); a too-strong conviction of "Surely not now, surely not here, when we've come so very far."

This is happening. Yes, now. Yes, here.

House Republicans have gutted an independent ethics watchdog, putting it under their own control, in a secret ballot hours before the new Congress convened for the first time.

The unheralded vote severely weakens the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), which was set up after a lobbying scandal in 2008 to investigate corruption allegations against members of Congress. The move, led by the head of the House judiciary committee, defied the Republican congressional leadership and was reportedly supported by several legislators currently under OCE scrutiny.

Outcry after Republicans vote to dismantle independent ethics body | US news | The Guardian

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I agree with this Rogue One review on all points

Especially in regard to it being the smartest Star Wars film.

Most fun? No.

Most “pop it in on a Saturday afternoon just for the heck of it?” No.

Smartest? I don’t even think it’s a contest.

"It’s not about young people growing up, like essentially all the Skywalker films are, with Luke and Anakin and Padme and Rey and Finn all either coming into their own power or falling out of it. All the primary characters in Rogue One are all already grown up and morally compromised in one way or another. The rebellion is not the simple and clean moral engine for good it was portrayed as before; there’s lots of gray around its edges and in its practices, and its sole moral advantage is that the Empire truly is just plain fascistic evil."

Rogue One, or, the Disneyfication of Star Wars is Complete (and This is a Good Thing) – Whatever
(NOTE: This review of Rogue One is spoiler-free but I will be allowing the conversion in the comment thread to contain spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, you might want to skip the comments for now.) As I walked out of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story last night, the male half of a …