The Small Matter Of A Female President

Michelle Goldberg has written an excellent article about the dreams and nightmares of those who would like to see one half of humanity a little bit more often represented in positions of power.  Of course, to even address this question is for some a clear sign of identity politics.  What's not identity politics is to always have men leading countries, and in the US, with one exception, white men.  That last sentence is for clarification, in case you are unclear about what non-identity politics might be.

You should read Goldberg's article, because it is nuanced and also gives the results from many studies which suggest that being female is a negative for politicians.  What I wish to discuss is one quote from the article, by the researcher Dan Cassino who has studied the role of sexism in not voting for women politicians:

According to Cassino, the long-term solution to male anxiety about female leadership “is that you run women so often that it becomes absolutely unremarkable.” Seen that way, the next primary could mark the beginning of this process. “It’s a coming of age,” Lake says. “It’s not just about a woman candidate. It’s that all the best candidates are women.”

This reminds me of early work by Virginia Valian (or at least reported by her) in her book Why So Slow.  She describes studies where the study participants were asked to rate various job applicants for a job in a firm.  Both the applicants and the firm were fictitious, but the participants were told what percentage of the firm's labor force already was female,  and they also knew the sex of the various applicants they were asked to rate.

The results of those studies tell us that if the number of women the fictitious firm was already assumed to be employing equaled or exceeded some critical mass (possibly 30%), then female applicants were judged as just people with particular job skills.  If, on the other hand, the fictitious firm was supposed to employ fewer women than the critical mass, the female applicants were judged as representatives of "womanhood" first, and that judging was likely to elicit all the stereotypes the participants, both female and male, had about women.

If the same results apply to politics*, then what Cassino suggests could be true, and also a detour around the road blocks the sexists have erected on the basis of Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

It's her almost unique situation as a very powerful political woman in this country that makes assessing the role of sexism in her treatment so difficult.  A sample of size one lends itself to few clear conclusions, though I'm pretty sure that Hillary Clinton has been scrutinized through a magnifying glass while one Donald Trump has been allowed to get away with anything, and that suggests to me that Clinton's sex had a role to play.

Clearly, then, we need many more women to enter politics.  That sounds awkward, given the treatment they might expect, but if the critical mass could be achieved the sexist treatment would fade away or at least look for other interesting targets for attack.  On the online, say.

-------

*  I see something of this sort happening when newspapers etc. report on the filling of important posts.  If the job goes to a woman the article rarely even addresses that, with the exception of jobs where the appointed woman is the first female job-holder ever.  What the comments to the articles say is naturally a horse of a very different color.  But nothing good comes from reading unmoderated comments.

  



 

More Presents From Trump To His Base

These are fun ones.  For example, you are now more likely to die or be financially devastated in a hurricane or other weather disaster, because of our Dear Leader:  Both NOAA, the agency overseeing weather forecasting and FEMA, the agency responding to disasters, are without leaders, though the latter has a nomination pending.  Then there is this:

For states and communities hit by floods, tornadoes, wildfires and other disasters, the Trump budget slashes another important source of recovery funds. The Department of Housing and Urban Development provides money that helps communities rebuild after a disaster, after FEMA has moved on. The Trump budget cuts that $3 billion fund to zero.

Trump's great managerial skills are reflected in all that, I'm sure.

And remember how he promised to drain the swamp in Washington, DC?  To get rid of all those lobbyists?  Well, that promise isn't much honored:

The White House disclosed Wednesday evening that it has granted ethics waivers to 17 appointees who work for President Trump and Vice President Pence, including four former lobbyists.

 Among the high-profile figures who received waivers: White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, who were both permitted to engage with their former employers or clients. In addition, a blanket waiver was given to all executive office appointees to interact with news organizations — a move that gives chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon permission to communicate with Breitbart News, the conservative website he used to run. 

The rate at which the Trump White House has handed out waivers is far faster than that of the Obama administration, which issued 17 exemptions for White House appointees over eight years.

Bolds are mine.

Isn't that delicious and juicy?  Trump is clearly much more productive than Obama ever was.  And Stephen Bannon, the white male supremacist, can continue communicating with Breitbart News, to equally productively steer the conservative media.

But of course the assumption that the swamp in Washington DC referred to lobbyists is for our consumption.  Trump-voters fully know that the swamp referred to the Democrats, and that Trump promised to get rid of every single one of them.

Finally, the Trump administration is considering handing back the Russian-occupied properties which Obama shut down:

The Trump administration is moving toward handing back to Russia two diplomatic compounds, near New York City and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, that its officials were ejected from in late December as punishment for Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

President Barack Obama said Dec. 29 that the compounds were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes” and gave Russia 24 hours to vacate them. Separately, Obama expelled from the United States what he said were 35 Russian “intelligence operatives.”

 Those guys are part of Trump's base, though that the Trump administration would consider this move seems shocking, given that

...[the] administration and former Trump campaign officials are under congressional and special counsel investigation for alleged ties to Russia.

Our Dear Leader is the Gift That Keeps On Giving.

-----------
I'm not sure why I bother to writer about all this.  I very much doubt any Trump-voter reads here, what with the news bubbles and the two separate theories about how the world works.

 

"Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." On Trump And Climate.

That (from the Bible, of all things) is the proper interpretation of Trump's decision to drag the US out of the Paris climate accord.  It's the refusal to consider the lives of future generations, even the lives of Trump's own grandchildren or their children, perhaps because Trump agrees with Louis XV (or Madame Pompadour) that whatever happens after his death is of no consequence:  Après nous le déluge.

It's a big fuck-you gesture to those who worry about the giant refugee floods which will follow when parts of the world become uninhabitable or incapable of feeding their populations.  And it's a humongous fuck-you to the "elites", the experts (i.e., those who have actually studied something), and anyone who didn't vote for Trump.

Coal will not return to Pittsburgh, even though Trump uttered this inanity:

“It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio, Detroit, Mich., and Pittsburgh, Pa., along with many, many other locations within our great country before Paris, France,” he said. “It is time to make America great again.”

It is an inanity because the Paris climate accord is not about the city of Paris at all.  It is about this planet, and Trump pretends to put the towns of Youngstown, Detroit and Pittsburgh ahead of all humankind. 

And it is also an inanity, because many more jobs are lost for other reasons than the climate accord,  in other industries, such as retail.  But those jobs are not the types of manly-man jobs the Republicans like to use as political bait.

So let's eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.  At least the capitalists can make money by selling us our last dinners, on styrofoam plates.

Trump's stupidity is a scourge in itself, but the implications of his behavior, including this most recent travesty, are much more serious:

Those who used to be the allies of the United States now receive Trump's wrath, those who do not have the best interests of Western liberalism* in mind now receive his praise and his submission.  The risks in international politics are rising, and the principles of democracy are losing.

It is that possibly terminal illness of the basic values of democracies that still horrifies me:  The world has turned its face toward fascism, religious extremism and radical klepto-capitalism, and enough people in the world like what they see there.

Stephen Bannon, a white male supremacists who is now the main strategist of this country and who wishes to destroy the administrative state (to replace it with what? anarchy?) is one of those people.  The linked New York Times article notes that it's his sweaty fingerprints we can see in Trump's climate decision:

The president’s decision was a victory for Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, and Scott Pruitt, his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, both of whom had argued forcefully to abandon the global agreement in favor of a clean break that would clear the way for a new environmental approach.

But let's not just demonize Bannon (though he hardly needs external help in that).  Let's also note that most Republicans applauded Trump's decision.  It is, of course, a victory, if one's goals are only about oneself and only about short-term selfish satisfactions.



----------

* By that term in this post I mean countries which are, at least in theory,  built on basic concepts of fairness and equality: universal suffrage, freedom of speech and the media, equal treatment of the sexes and the races, full protection for sexual minorities and legal systems which provide citizens with basic safety nets and rein in the worst aspects of capitalism.

Final Fund-Raising Post

My sincere thanks to all who have contributed toward the purchase of a new computer for the Snakepit Inc.  This one is nine years old and a bit doddering.

There's still time to give me money!

As a general thank you, this is Karri, a gentleman cat, who would send me money if he had any:

The Gifts of Trump Administration to the Ladies

I get that Trump's tweets are fun to take apart, and I get that other similar behavioral and linguistic outrages are what draws most attention.  But what ultimately matters to all of us are the policies.  Those boring granola topics which nevertheless can bring you security and comfort or pain and anxiety.

So let us see what the Trump administration is promising to women in their policies:

Fund-Raising Post. And On Trump's Language Through the Ages.

There is still time to contribute to the survival of this blog.  The instructions are in the left column.  My warmest thanks to all who have contributed and to all who read here.

Trump's limited vocabulary has troubled me for some time.  It is an odd aspect of the most powerful man on this earth.  His basket of adjectives is oversupplied with "greatest" "tremendous" "crooked," "corrupt," "bad" and "evil," all very emotional and basic adjectives, easily used for the purposes of exaggeration.

But it's not just Trump's limited vocabulary which troubles me, it's also the way he describes the day-to-day policies and politics of his job as the president of the United States.  If Trump was female,  critics would immediately see the way he evaluates other heads of states based on how he likes them as people and how nice they were to him,  because those are assumed to be stereotypical female characteristics.

All this made me want to know if Trump has always used the same limited vocabulary in the same self-centered and emotionally concrete manner*, or if that is a new development.  Note that should the latter turn out to be the case, we still wouldn't be able to tell why his vocabulary might have changed.  The changes could be a conscious policy, an attempt to come across as a simple man-of-the-people, or they could be evidence of verbal deterioration or both.

To learn more about this I went to YouTube and chose several videos from 1980 to 2017 where Trump was being interviewed on television**.  Interviews provide a context for speech that stays roughly constant over time, though the topics of the interviews do differ.  The earlier interviews I found are about Trump's real estate deals, while the later ones are more focused on politics.

It's important to stress that this tour of Trump's language over time is not a proper research piece.  That would require the kind of skills linguists have.  All I wanted to do is to see if anything obvious would stick out when one speed-listens to Trump speak over the last 37 years.

And I'm not sure what might stick out.  My tentative conclusions are these: 

1.  If we compare the Trump of 1980 to the Trump of 2017 the differences in the dexterity with which he uses language, in his demeanor and in the emotional content of the speech are pretty clear.

But that might be true just because of the passing of the time and the changes in the topics which are covered in the various interviews.  For example, the 1980 interview is about his real estate business, an area where he stood on the firmest of grounds, while the 2017 interviews were given after the first hundred days of his much-criticized presidency.  He would feel more threatened in the latter circumstances.

2.  Trump hated the media a long time before he decided to use that hatred as a Republican meme. 

3.  His use of certain strong-and-simple adjectives ("great," "tremendous," "bad") is not entirely recent, but its frequency seems to have increased from 2007 onward (though this, too, could be an artifact of some interviews having more anger-causing topics).

4.  The self-praise and self-congratulatory aspect of Trump's current speech is very much stronger than anything I could find in his earlier interviews.  If he gave himself credit in those, he did it in a much more subtle manner.

I would love to see a proper study of this topic.



--------

* I can't think of a better term for the kind of concreteness I believe his speech conveys.  He seldom leaves the narrow emotional word around Donald Trump, even when he talks about global politics.

** If you wish to spend some time on videos of that type, here are the ones I watched yesterday: Trump 1980,  Trump 1988 (from 16:14 onward), Trump 1989, Trump 1990, Trump 1998,  Trump 2005 (with Melania Trump), Trump 2007,  Trump 2010,  Trump 2014, Trump 2017. 

The Tweeting President

I have no idea if Trump's twitter account has suddenly purchased several million pretend-followers*, as this story tells us, but if that indeed is the case, what is Trump planning to do?

Notice how paranoid I'm getting under the Turd Reich?  If the government strives to be opaque and refuses to be open, those who try to understand what it might be up to must use the flight -- or the twittering -- of birds to make their predictions.

-----

* Or if someone else has purchased them to make Trump look even worse.

When Trump Plays Tic-Tac-Toe, Others Play Multidimensional Chess

Trump's isolationist and sulky international politics have repercussions which may not have popped into his mind:

Reflecting on the fraught new era of U.S. relations with Germany, and Europe at large, German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke on Sunday at a beer hall, and contended that her continent-mates “really must take our fate into our own hands.”
Those jitters about already weakening transatlantic alliances were surely heightened as President Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday morning and accused Germany of maintaining a trade imbalance and under-contributing to NATO. Trump has also suggested that he might withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on combating climate change, which Merkel has championed.
Merkel on Tuesday reiterated her sense that Europe must seek new alliances, telling reporters in Berlin, “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days.”

The reference to the "past few days" is a reference to Trump, but not only to Trump.  It's also a reference to the American voters' most recent choice and the lessons the Europeans are learning from that in the longer-run:  Americans are unpredictable, easy to manipulate and willing to elect a megalomaniac, narcissist and ignorant president.

Americans are not alone in apparently preferring megalomaniac dictators as both history, especially German history,  and recent elections in countries such as Russia and Turkey tell us.  But while Putin and Erdogan understand the games they are playing, I doubt that Trump does.

For instance, when Merkel states that Europe can no longer count on the US, what are the alternatives she might have in mind?  More nuclear weapons development in Europe?  Closer cooperation with some of the rising super-powers?

Whatever they are, the consequences to most of the world and to the US are unlikely to be positive.  Besides, the increased uncertainty and unpredictability of international politics is a risk on its own.

Day Three of My Fund-Raising Week

It's not too late to donate money to guarantee the future of this tiny blog.  As I mentioned earlier, do not give if it would cause you hardship.

Thanks for reading!

Here are a few fun stories about women, to balance all the not-so-nice stories I feel compelled to write:

Brenda Milner is 98-years old and still works three days a week as a cognitive neuroscientist.

Maria Lorena Ramirez, a 22-year old indigenous Mexican runner, won the women's fifty kilometer ultra-Marathon competition in Puebla, Mexico, last April.  She ran wearing basic sandals (made out of recycled tire rubber), a skirt, hat and a kerchief.

And Rhonda Grayer's family company, WT Stevens, is one of just four companies to be awarded a contract to replace the contaminated water pipes in Flint, Michigan. 

Justice in Bangladesh: A Parable.

Bangladesh is a case study of a country which is slowly becoming more fundamentalist.  Consider the most recent example:

Under pressure from Islamic hard-liners, the Bangladeshi authorities in the predawn hours on Friday swiftly and quietly removed a sculpture of a woman personifying justice from outside the country’s Supreme Court building.

The hard-liners argue that Islam does not allow the depiction* of living beings in art.  Bangladesh's prime minister, Sheikh Hasina appears to have consented to the removal of the statue which was only erected five months ago.

I cannot tell if she believes that such a compromise would make the hard-liners content or if she has other political motivations.  Nevertheless, Bangladesh already suffers from extremist violence:

In recent years, its authorities have struggled to contain extremist violence against religious minorities, foreigners, gay people and secular intellectuals. Attendance at madrasas, or Islamic schools, is swelling, and more women are wearing the hijab, or head scarf.

What drives this radicalization in Bangladesh?  Is it supported by the petro-dollars or is it home-grown or both?  Whatever the seeds that have been sewn, the harvest is not something the world might want to gather.

_______

*  This is based on the sayings of Mohammed, the hadiths, and not on the Quran, as far as I can tell.  The original intention was most likely to ban idolatry. 

Note that Bangladesh is nominally a secular country, though with Islam as its state religion. 

Signs of the Times: Gianforte, Trump and Mulvaney

1.  Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate in the Montana special election, joined the war against the media by allegedly assaulting Ben Jacobs,  a reporter for the UK Guardian.  Gianforte's spokesman gave a statement which ends with:

It's unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ.

There ya go. What did Ben Jacobs do to make Gianforte so mad?  Sounds like the kind of stuff domestic abusers say (you made me do it).

2.  Our Dear Leader is working hard to be the PR person for the United States.  It's great comedy or would be, if I was watching it with nectar and manna at hand on some other planet. 

The man has no social intelligence.  I guess he has never needed it, what with having been born with a golden hoof in his mouth and having grown up the little king of his world, surrounded by yes-men and yes-women.

3.  Mick Mulvaney, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget removes his human mask and bluntly states his views:*

For years, we’ve focused on how we can help Americans receive taxpayer-funded assistance. Under President Trump’s leadership, we’re now looking at how we can respect both those who require assistance and the taxpayers who fund that support. For the first time in a long time, we’re putting taxpayers first. 

Taking money from someone without an intention to pay it back is not debt. It is theft. This budget makes it clear that we will reverse this larceny. The president’s budget will put our country’s budget back into balance.

Taxation is theft, eh?  I doubt Mulvaney thinks that giving even more money to the already-bloated US military is theft.  But subsidizing the health care costs of poor people certainly is.

Let's see what thieving Mulvaney's budget plans to stop:

President Donald Trump's budget plans to cut the Children's Health Insurance Program by at least 20% over the next two fiscal years and slash Medicaid, which covers millions more children.
Millions of poor and working families could lose their health coverage if his proposed budget, released Tuesday and called "A New Foundation for American Greatness," gets through as-is. It would hit children's health care hard and break Trump's campaign promise to "save" Medicaid "without cuts."
Over the next decade, the proposed budget would cut Medicaid more than $800 billion, or nearly a quarter of what the health care program is projected to spend on poor families.
Poor children are covered by a complicated mix of programs. Medicaid covers 37 million children. The Children's Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, has 8.9 million enrolled. Together, these two programs cover about one in three American children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Elsewhere Mulvaney states that he believes in the social safety net, but that he doesn't want it to be misused:

“If you’re on food stamps and you’re able-bodied, we need you to go to work,” Mulvaney said during a briefing with reporters on Monday. “If you’re on disability insurance and you’re not supposed to be, if you’re not truly disabled, we need you to go back to work. We need everybody pulling in the same direction.”

But the way to fix such misuse should be to supervise the basis on which help is given, not to cut the total amount of money going into, say, the CHIP program.  Children shouldn't have to go back to work or be punished for having bad parents. 

Their job is to go to school, and healthy children will do that job better and end up more productive and useful citizens, ultimately benefiting everyone in the society, even Mick Mulvaney.

------
* This proposal may never turn into reality, but it tells us what the Trump administration would like to happen.

Time To Pay The Piper

Or the start of my begging week* which will run to the end of next week's Wednesday.  This year I have an actual project (other than the usual expenses), and that is my need for a new computer.  This one (bought by my lovely readers, by the way, in 2008) is beginning to misbehave.  It's slow as molasses in January, and I want to be ready for its demise.

Please do not give if you are poor.  The ways to give are described in the left column.  If you prefer not to use PayPal, send me an email about other ways for me to get money for a computer and chocolate.

May I take this opportunity to thank you all for reading, for your past contributions and for being you.  I also want to thank those of you who send me a little every month.  I only recently found out how to send those folks thank-you emails.  My silence was not ingratitude, in other words.

---------

*  That odd part of Echidne must pick the worst time of the year for the funding week!  I still feel embarrassed about asking for money, even though I do work very very hard on the stories I put up here.

The Isla Vista Killings

Happened three years ago.  I wrote about Elliot Rodger in 2014.  That post, sadly, is still relevant, given the misogynist online sites.

A Political Paradox: The Anti-Extremist Ideology Center in Riyadh.

The glowing orb in this picture, taken while our Dear Leader was visiting his BFFs in Saudi Arabia, is a decoration in a new center in Riyadh.  The center is intended to combat extremist ideology. 

Most politics has those incredible paradoxes, the kinds which any observer from outer space would immediately place one of her twenty-one fingers on and then shake her three heads with great sadness, trying to understand them.  In this case the paradox is why the country* which is the home of the most extremist religious ideology in Islam would now build a center to combat its own messages to the rest of the world.  

After all, the petro-dollars have financed Wahhabist mosques all over the world, including in Europe,  and it is the ur-conservative and extremely literal Wahhabist interpretations of the Quran which the terrorists in ISIS, for example, have partly used  to create their own theological justifications for terror attacks, slavery,  the wholesale killing of those whose religious beliefs differ, and the extreme oppression of women.

But then similar paradoxes abound elsewhere, too.  The United States is not exactly innocent in that respect, either.

Still, it's imperative to address the long-term negative effects of religious extremism which is rearing its ugly head not just in Islam but also in Christianity and Hinduism. 

This is particularly crucial for the equality of women and men, because extremists/literalists always base their views of women's proper roles on what ancient nomadic herding societies thought those were,  and then desire to make them today's norms.  Indeed, one might even argue that the rise of religious fundamentalism may be a partial response to women's increasing rights.

---------

*  The word "country" is here used to refer to the rulers and clergy of Saudi Arabia, not the ordinary citizens of the country.

Short Posts 5/22/17: On Conservative Ethics, Gerrymandering and Cats

1.  Donald Trump's budget proposal is the sadists' wish-list.  It won't pass, but as this Slate piece states, that shouldn't make us less frightened:

It is essentially a stack of papers telling Republicans that they are free to go wild butchering essential pieces of the safety net in order to fund extraordinary tax cuts for the wealthy and increased defense spending. Food stamps? In Trump’s proposal, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program gets $193 billion in cuts over 10 years, and would allow states to stiffen work requirements for the program. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, aka welfare as we now know it? Its already anemic funding gets slashed by $21 billion. The administration is already trying to spin this kind of hatchet work as “welfare reform”—but it's mostly just a signal to conservatives that they can get their cleavers out, should they feel compelled. The same goes for the $800 billion in Medicaid cuts, which mirror the reductions in the House health care bill, and the reported reductions to Social Security Disability Insurance.

A harsher, more cruel country is in the making.  But at least the market for yachts will boom.

Facebook: Moderating Violence

The UK Guardian writes about Facebook and moderation.  The article makes for interesting reading.  The following table gives examples about violent comments which are acceptable (the green check mark) and those which are not (the red x):

Put your thinking caps on and figure out why someone cannot say "stab and become the fear of the Zionists," but can say "kick a person with red hair."  Or why it's perfectly fine to teach someone how to kill "a bitch."

I understand why the advocating of violence against a named person is not allowed.  But the Zionists are a group of unnamed individuals, and so are people with red hair or fat people.  And women certainly are a demographic group.  Yet only the hate message to Zionists would cause it to be deleted.

Facebook:  Where millions of people exchange funny cat videos, cute baby pictures and advice on how to snap the neck of a bitch...

Figuring Out What Is Happening In The Russian Investigations

Figuring out what is happening in the Russian investigations is almost impossibly hard, for several reasons. 

First, the media industry is in dire straits, given that it can no longer reliably use advertising revenue to fund the news production and given that it has not been able to find an alternative viable funding plan*.  This means, among other things, that every journalist must write click-bait articles, to get as many eyeballs as possible to look at a particular piece of writing, and even if there's nothing worthy of so many eyes in the article itself. 

Thus,  I have recently read "new revelations" which came out months ago, or "revelations" which are speculations.  Real revelations can drown in that sea of noise.

Second, the conservative media tries its utmost to toss out alternative stories, different click-bait, to stir the pot and to confuse the audience.  Instead of some type of public debate or conversation, we have a war of words.

Third, the journalists who write boring, carefully sourced and thrice checked articles are the journalists without an audience. 

That is very sad.  It's partly the consequence of the trend Roger Ailes began where loud arguments and opinion pieces replaced news at Fox News and later, by osmosis, influenced the way news is covered in other media outlets, too.   But it's partly also this new era where everyone can be a citizen journalist, where nobody needs to learn how one verifies something and where a lie indeed has orbited the world many times before truth has its hobnailed boots laced up.

And, finally, its partly because too many Americans follow politics as consumers rather than as citizens, and because that following then depends on how entertaining it is.

-------

*  When I talk about that online the usual answer is that people would be willing to pay for news if they only were better quality news.  The problem with that answer is that it's not true, given the public goods nature of information.  As long as we can get the information without paying for it, that is what we will do.

Sadly, that response is rational in the short-run, but in the long-run it means the end of news production as a properly vetted process.  (I'm preparing you all for my blog funding week which begins this coming Monday!  Give often!) 

Quotes To Think About, Friday, May 19, 2017

These short quotes are nuggets of pure gold.

- An obituary of Roger Ailes (of Fox News fame) states:

Kaplan said Ailes was also a brilliant TV producer who was keenly aware that even with talking heads, he was working in a visual medium. Fox News always had state-of-the-art graphics and animation. His penchant for putting attractive women on the air, with legs displayed on the set, was well known.
“Roger has a very visually pleasing network in terms of look and color and form,” Kaplan said. “Roger cared about what it looked like.”

I love the idea of women as part of the great visual experience Ailes created.

- Brooke Gladstone asks why Trump lies:

By far the greatest source of anxiety for those watching the edifice of reality collapse is the ceaseless cascade of lies. But it is not the lies that pose the existential danger to democracy. It’s the lying, the kind of thoroughgoing lying that gives rise to a whole new reality or, better still, to no reality at all.

Journalist Masha Gessen resists equating Trump with Putin, as American media are prone to do, but says they are kin in the use of the lie: “It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose—blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”

The sheer abundance of lies demonstrates, again and again, that facts are disposable, confusing devices that do not serve you, that do not matter.

Bolds are mine.

- A USAToday opinion piece asks us to consider an alternative presidency:

Imagine what would have happened had a President Hillary Clinton abruptly fired the man overseeing an investigation of her campaign’s ties to a hostile foreign government.

We know what would have happened.  The yells of "Lock Her Up" would never have quieted down (not that they are completely silent even now). 

The presidential campaigns told us enough about the alternative rules.  Imagine if a woman had run for the president of the United States after having had children with three separate men...

-  An interesting lefty take on a few questions affecting women:

In a speech at Planned Parenthood’s annual gala last week, Clinton took the opportunity to talk about . . . memes. Referencing a photo of a uniformly white and male House Freedom Caucus discussing health care cuts, Clinton asked, “Could you believe those photos of men around that conference table, deciding how to strip away coverage for pregnancy and maternity care?” before adding: “I gotta say, my favorite Internet meme about this were the dogs sitting around the table discussing ‘feline care.’ I found that so on point.”
The next day, while being fêted as a Gloria Awards’ Women of Vision honoree, Clinton descended even deeper into social media myopia. Speaking to the crowd, she said, “I just want all these Twitter trolls out there to know that maybe if you had left us alone, we might have gone out longer in the woods for our walks, but every time you hit those 140 characters demeaning women’s voices and rights, we’re comin’ back at you.”

Has Trump Really Been Treated Soooo Unfairly by the Media?

There are times when I simply must write an obvious post, and this is one of those times.

Our Dear Leader gave a commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy in which he

 proclaimed that "no politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly" by the media.

Is this really the case?  Let's see:  Suppose that I'm one of your two neighbors.  The other neighbor, the one that is not a nasty snake goddess with venom, knocks on your door to give you flowers or freshly-baked bread or bottles of bubbling wine on your birthday.  I, on the other hand, put dead snails through your mailbox, cut out nasty pictures from magazines and glue them on your front door and aim at you with a peashooter when you leave for work in the morning.

You might then badmouth me and praise your other neighbor, sure.  But would that be unfair treatment?

In other words, we can't compare the media's treatment of various politicians without holding constant that most important of all its determinants:  How that politician has acted.

Trump acts like a pampered two-year old in a temper tantrum.

On the other hand, I would argue that the way Hillary Clinton has been treated has a strong failure of having been caused by "politicking while female."  It doesn't matter that she is flawed or the ways in which she is flawed.  If her name had been Harry Clinton she wouldn't have been put through the mangle so very many times.

What Conservative Outlets Spoke about Today

While this side of the aisle lives and breathes Trump's incompetence and the risk that poses on not only to the United States but to the world, the other side of the aisle, in that other reality, has totally different news and people are worried about something quite different:

The murder of Seth Rich.

I had to Google the name to learn about Seth Rich*.  He was brutally killed in Washington, DC, on July 10, 2016.  At the time of his death he was a Voter Expansion Data Director at the DNC.  The police interpreted his death as robbery gone wrong:

Rich was shot about a block from his home in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C.^{[9][10][11][12]} Police were alerted to gunfire at 4:20 am by an automated gunfire locator called ShotSpotter.^[12][13] Rich was found conscious but later died in the hospital.^[10] Newsweek reported that police said he may have been killed in an attempted robbery and that the neighborhood had recently been plagued by robberies. Although Rich's watch strap was torn, nothing had apparently been taken from him.^[9]

The conservatives, or some cells inside that wide organism, believe that the DNC or some Democratic politician killed Rich.  Why?

Because the conservatives believe (or want others to believe) that Rich was the source which provided Wikileaks with thousands of DNC emails.

Why write about this now?  Because a private investigator working for Rich's family had stated that he had found evidence of contact between Rich and Wikileaks.

Thus we get today's headlines in many right-wing newspapers and Internet sites:

"NOT RUSSIA, BUT AN INSIDE JOB?" asked Breitbart, the far-right website previously led by White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, which said that "if proven, the report has the potential to be one of the biggest cover-ups in American political history, dispelling the widespread claim that the Russians were behind hacks on the DNC."
"DEAD DNC STAFFER 'HAD CONTACT' WITH WIKILEAKS," declared the headline of the Drudge Report, the highly-trafficked conservative news destination.
Fox News on Tuesday morning joined in the chorus, publishing a lead story on its website about the "DC MURDER MYSTERY." The story said Wheeler had made the claim Wikileaks had been in contact with Rich. It added that a federal investigator, who it said had spoken on the condition of anonymity, corroborated it.

Here's the next twist.  The private investigator later stated that he had found no such evidence.  Instead, he had heard about the evidence from the reporter he spoke to for that Fox News story in the above link.

That sounds a little circular, don't you think?

Anyway.  If you live in the conservative bubble, you will believe that the Washington Post and other liberal media are making such a hullabaloo about Trump's innocent slips and slides only to cover up these new findings which probably show that Hillary was out there last summer, killing people.  Or if not the bitch herself, then one of her henchmen or henchwomen.**

The impact of our news bubbles can be fatal for democracy.  If one half of Americans believe that the main event in recent domestic politics has been Trump's leaky mouth and the other half believes that it would have been the cover-up of the source of Wikileaks or even the cover-up of a murder by the DNC, well, we might as well not vote in the same reality, never mind the same country.

Something must be done about this new fashion where we don't only have our own opinions, but where facts are whatever you prefer them to be, without evidence needed.

-------

*  I feel awful about the heartless way I discuss the tragic death of a young man who had his whole life ahead of him.  His family must be greatly hurt by the politicization of his death.  My sincere apologies for any extra pain I am causing.

**  I got those ideas from various conservative comments threads where people believe that an evil deep state is going to take the brave and innocent champion of small people, Donald J. Trump, down.  Just because it is evil.