Rebecca Solnit: “I’m the Problem; It’s Me”: On the Confession the Mainstream Media Won’t Make
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We in the USA are in deep trouble and a major reason for the trouble we’re in is the mainstream media and their many persistent distortions of truth, fact, reality in service of their agendas and the limits of their worldview (and lack of resistance to intimidation by the right). That habit has contributed hugely to a misinformed electorate, which in turn contributes to the outcomes of elections. The msm have sins of omission (not covering or playing down important and impactful news, including out of deference to the right), sins of obsession (pumping up minor stories into manufactured scandal and drama), and sins of distortion ( many kinds of bias manifested in many ways).
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In Christian theology, original sin is what Adam and Eve committed by disobeying God; in American history, slavery is often said to be this nation’s original sin; but in this book it’s being old.
The New York Times, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Nation, New York Magazine, and of course CNN and Axios have all featured stories in the last few days generally treating its contents as gospel, piling on its claims that key people cited in the book (which is not out yet, but apparently available to select sources) say aren’t true. Political scientist and Atlantic contributor Norman Orenstein tweeted in a rare dissent, “I have a hard time watching journalists high five each other over books on WH covering up for Biden. A diversion from their own deep culpability in Trump’s election. False equivalence, normalizing the abnormal, treating Trump as no real danger were the norm, not the exception.”
In the present moment, many of them have glommed onto Tapper and Thompson’s unnamed source’s claim that someone said Biden might someday need a wheelchair and inflated it into a headline-grabbing scandal. They thereby conflate physical and cognitive decline, which is insulting to all the brilliant people of all ages who get around on wheels. We did once have a president who used a wheelchair, and he was the most powerful and effective president of the twentieth century and arguably the greatest. Franklin Delano Roosevelt served three terms and part of a fourth while mobility-impaired thanks to polio – you know, the terrible disease that almost disappeared in this country after 1955 because of a vaccine that Health and Human services secretary RFK Jr. would maybe like to withdraw.
(Rebecca Solnit more…)
EmptyWheel: Journalists’ Persistent Willingness to Chase Trump’s Squirrels, Biden Recording Edition
To get a sense of how much releasing recordings of Rob Hur’s interview with Joe Biden in advance of the legal release of them was about attention management, you need look no further than the Fox News homepage (this was from shortly after midnight ET).
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There is a bit of news, or scandal, to this release, but it’s not covered there (or even by Axios).
Biden invoked Executive Privilege over the recordings, correctly predicting that (as Axios noted without mentioning the privilege invocation) scandal-mongers like Alex Thompson would “chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”
(EmptyWheel more…)
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Norman Eisen: SCOTUS Judo Flips Trump
If there is a single trend that has brought us from the scary dictatorial pomp and power of Donald Trump on Jan. 20 to the corrupt, clownish chaos of his administration today, it is Trump’s struggles with the law—above all with the Supreme Court. On Friday, he suffered another blow…and he knows it:
In a 7-2 decision that represents the latest in a virtually uninterrupted streak of failures for him at the High Court, it ruled that deportees must be given real due process–even alleged gang members. The Trump authoritarian approach of “notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.”One of the advantages of doing this weekly column on the state of our democracy and The Contrarian’s coverage of it is that it forces me to lift my eyes off the trees and take a look at the sprawling forest. Well, here the forest consists of over 160 court orders checking Trump, of which this is only the latest. We’ve never seen anything like Trump’s illegality—or the pushback on it, including from all of his own appointees (in this latest decision).
(Norman Eisen more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – May 17, 2025
This weekend there are two major anniversaries for the history of civil rights in the United States. Seventy-one years ago today, on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That landmark decision declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. It overturned the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision handed down 129 years ago tomorrow. On that day, May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment allowed segregation within states so long as accommodations were “equal.”
The journey from Plessy to Brown was the story of ordinary people creating change with the tools they had at hand.
Recently, scholars have shown how, after the Plessy decision, Black Americans in the South used state civil law to advance their civil rights. Insisting on their rights in the South’s complicated system of credits and debts, they hammered out a legal identity. Denied justice under criminal law, they sued companies, primarily railroad companies, for denying them equal protection against harassment. And, according to historian Myisha S. Eatmon, they often won these civil suits, even at the hands of all-white juries.
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The court’s decision, handed down on May 17, 1954, explicitly overturned Plessy, saying that segregated schools denied Black children “the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.”The decision was a long time coming, even though Justice John Marshall Harlan had anticipated it almost 60 years before. Harlan wrote a dissenting opinion in Plessy harking back to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in which the Supreme Court denied that Black Americans could be citizens and said they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The American people had emphatically overruled that decision by adding the Fourteenth Amendment—on which Brown v. Board was based—to the U.S. Constitution.
“In my opinion,” Harlan wrote in 1896, “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Bulwark: How to Take Medicaid from Millions of Americans, in Less Than 72 Hours
There’s a reason Republicans are in such a rush to get Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through Congress.
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Considering such a dramatic change over the weekend, with no hearings or expert analysis and with an eye towards a vote on Sunday night—to GOP leaders this a feature of the process, not a bug.They know this bill’s political future may ultimately depend less on when the pain of its policies starts to hit, and more on how soon the public figures out what’s in store.
(Bulwark more…)
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Atlantic: Trump’s Real Secretary of State
How the president’s friend and golfing partner Steve Witkoff got one of the hardest jobs on the planet
(Atlantic more…)
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AP: FDA approves Novavax COVID-19 shot but with unusual restrictions
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Wired: How the Signal Knockoff App TeleMessage Got Hacked in 20 Minutes
The company behind the Signal clone used by at least one Trump administration official was breached earlier this month. The hacker says they got in thanks to a basic misconfiguration.
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Noah Berlatsky: Me vs. the IRS
A parable for our time
A couple weeks ago I got the letter from the IRS you don’t want to get.“Dear Sniveling Taxpayer,” it said. “You owe us; you’re overdue. Put your life savings in the enclosed envelope or we will seize your wages and also your cats. Tremble!”
Okay, it didn’t quite say that. But it did say that I hadn’t paid my taxes.
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Eventually I found a phone number tucked into a corner of a screen, called it, waited for an hour and a half, and then had to give up to walk the dog.But I tried again the next day, waited an hour, and a not especially cheerful federal employee took all my data and said that, hey, I didn’t owe anything. They apparently sent the overdue letters before the taxes were actually due on April 15 (?) so I (and maybe a certain number of other people?) received overdue notices sent before we were overdue?
(Noah Berlatsky more…)
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Mary Geddry: The Far-Right Is Global Now and So Is the Backlash
From Springsteen to Sumy, Buffett to Bucharest, the resistance to authoritarianism is mounting, but so are the costs of letting it slide.
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That erosion of seriousness has consequences. The United States is now referred to in diplomatic circles as a “rogue state”, not just for its erratic leadership but for the damage it’s doing to global stability. Trump’s trade wars, broken alliances, and rejection of global norms have turned the U.S. from a respected power into a loud, unstable uncle at the geopolitical dinner table. Even strategic partners are backing away.
(Mary Geddry more…)
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Eric Topol: The First Human to Undergo In Vivo CRISPR 2.0 Personalized Genome Editing
A landmark event in medicine was reported this week that has implications well beyond its likelihood of saving a baby’s life. Until now, commercially available CRISPR genome editing (Casgevy) was not capable of directly fixing a genomic defect. It was a workaround plan, that can be regarded as CRISPR 1.0. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’m going to take you through the advances in genome editing and why the new case report at NEJM heralds an extraordinary opportunity for the future of medicine.
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We don’t know the actual cost of KJ’s genome editing, but had he gone onto a liver transplant it would likely have exceeded what this project cumulatively cost, and was supported by in kind contributions from multiple companies including Danahar, Alderon Biosciences, Acuitas Therapeutics, and Integrated DNA Technologies.
(Eric Topol more…)
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Thom Hartmann: The Right To Work For Less
Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: “The Hidden History of the American Dream”
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Raw Story: Trump’s own words are being thrown back in his face after his latest threat
The president over the weekend told Walmart’s executives that they should absorb any increased costs that he has created on imported goods through trade policies.
“I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!” Trump wrote as he demanded Wal-Mart and China simply “eat the tariffs.”
But that didn’t sit well with many longtime Trump onlookers, who observed that the president previously said no one would need to eat the tariffs.
Author James Surowiecki said, “But Trump has said over and over again that foreign countries pay tariffs, not US businesses or consumers.”
“If that’s true, why would Walmart have to eat anything?” he then asked.
(Raw Story more…)
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Tech Transparency Project: U.S.-Sanctioned Terrorists Enjoy Premium Boost on X
An advisor to al-Qaida. One of the founders of Hezbollah. The head of an Iraqi militia group known for attacks on U.S. troops. And a top official with the Houthi rebels who recently lashed out at the “criminal Trump.”These are among the U.S.-sanctioned terrorists who appear to have paid, premium accounts on Elon Musk’s X, a new Tech Transparency Project investigation has found, raising questions about the platform’s dealings with individuals who have been deemed a threat to U.S. national security.
(Tech Transparency Project more…)
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Closer to the Edge: The mast and the madness
A Mexican Navy ship struck the Brooklyn Bridge. Yes, really. No, the bridge is fine. The sailors? Not so much.
Saturday night in New York City: tourists snapping skyline photos, kids screaming in Times Square, overpriced cocktails being poured with reckless abandon — and the Mexican Navy slamming a masted ship into the Brooklyn Bridge.
(Closer to the Edge more…)
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NY Times: Palm Springs Explosion Damages Fertility Clinic
It is unclear if the clinic itself was intended to be a target of the bomb. But in vitro fertilization has become increasingly politicized in the debate over reproductive rights, while dividing social conservatives.
Many Christian conservatives who oppose abortion also oppose I.V.F. because they do not support the loss of embryos, which they consider people. Embryos are routinely discarded during I.V.F. if they fail to develop.
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Fox: Check washing crisis fueled by AI and mail theft
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
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