The Harris campaign has been allowed an expanded permit for the Ellipse event tonight, to have more than 40,000 attendees. The MPD is expecting 52,000.
This is what running through the tape looks like.
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Must be filling the place with illegals immigrants to get that many people to show up.
In a moment that is sure to tone down the batshit in Trumpās campaign, Steve Bannon is out of prison as of today.
I donāt understand the ābillionairesplainā comment. He is a business owner with no obligations to anybody but himself (and his own pocketbook) to explain his actions. Yet, he did. And I did not see any mansplaining themes in there at all. Just a guy explaining his rationale to his customers.
Overall, Iām not sure what the big kerfuffle is all about. It is pretty clear the Posts leanings. In the 27% of their history where they endorsed A candidate, they endorsed the Democratic candidate 100% of the time. Not endorsing a candidate does not change or alter their Long-standing political bias. If anything, it gives just a smidgen of Increased perceived neutral credibility.
Those are the facts of the matter, as I see them. Of course, that wonāt stop any of the emotion-based egregiously aggrieved diatribe from running its course about this big nothing burger.
The Post is supposed to be an independent member of the 4th estate. If in actuality itās just an elaborate BezoBlog, its customers are entirely justified in complaining and cancelling their subscriptions.
Bezos explaining why he interfered with the editorial independence of the Post is just another layer of the problem.
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The actual problem there lies in your first sentence. It is not nor has it ever been an independent member of the 4th estate and no amount of cutesy mission statements about ādemocracy dying in darknessā changes that. Every honest academic analysis of their writing has them leaning left. And a simple, cursory peek at their endorsement history across presidential (and state and local) elections bears this out.
Whatever your opinion of the Postās political leanings, its editorial process was independent of its owner. The moment the owner overtly stepped in is the moment he made it clear that the Post was his mouthpiece, not a journalistic enterprise.
That is what has upset people and caused a few hundred thousand subscribers to cancel. They wanted to read the what the Post had to say, not what Bezos has to say.
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For me, the ābillionairesplainingā comes in statements like this one, where heās arguing that yes, heās billionaire, but heās one of the good ones so we should trust that his motives here were good and pure. Moreover, he canāt be criticized for his actions becauseāif you conveniently ignore the specific decision at issueāheās got a great track record.
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasnāt happened.
Thereās also a fundamental tension in his explanation that I find difficult to square up. His entire rationale is that his non-endorsement decision is because he wants to to improve public perception of WaPoās independence and credibility.
But the manner and timing of the decision seems almost calculated to cast doubt on WaPoās independence and credibility. Why now, with the shadow of the election looming so closely and with the endorsement already written up? Why was it done without getting buy-in or at least advance notice to the affected stakeholders within the paper (i.e., actual editors and journalists)? Is it merely a coincidence that he makes this decision when the Biden-Harris FTC chief has her sights set on reigning in Amazonās abuses?
Basically, Bezos was pulling a jerkish tech billionaire move (i.e., making unilateral changes to the product and banking on peopleās forgiveness and/or short memory) but trying to sell it as a journalistic integrity move. It feels condescending.
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Leaning left as opposed to what, the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner?
As what currently comprises the conservative movement in the US descends into overt racism, utter disregard for basic democratic principles, outright contempt for the federal government and a near total rejection of objective reality the sort of refuge youāre seeking with these sorts of limp observations seems awfully fucking dangerous to me, if I may say so.
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And hereās another thing Iāll add while Iām still pissed about all this bullshit. Newspapers have an EDITORIAL department whose express purpose is to state OPINIONS. This is where endorsements come from. You donāt have to be any sort of genius to understand that there is a division between the newsroom and the editorial board. Fake pearl clutching over the fact that a group of literate, serious, thoughtful people with a minimum of chromosomal abnormalities frequently find themselves endorsing candidates who are sane and serious and public minded rather than the exact opposite is bullshit.
Modern self-proclaimed conservatives live in an airtight media ecosystem that lies to them in an egregious manner day and night and day and night. Thatās how you get significant groups of people who, oh, I donāt know, refuse to take a life saving vaccine in the middle of a global pandemic or decide to arm themselves and storm the center of democratic government in order to pervert the democratic process or risk incarceration by abstaining from their sworn duty to manage and certify elections properly or make death threats against judges and election officials over total fantasies or refuse to accept the reality of man made climate change or attack, harm and sometimes kill immigrants who are going about their lives minding their own business.
The two sides trope no longer exists. Instead we have one group that discusses and argues issues among ourselves with an eye towards improving the lives of ourselves and our neighbors, and another group that is fueled by hate, grievance and misinformation that rejects the very idea of government and wants to use the power it hopes to amass in order to punish groups it considers worthy of punishment.
The tired, old both siderism is no longer just annoying, itās perilously dangerous.
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In the Jan 6 case, Trump has been arguing ad nauseam that releasing evidence filed by prosecutors in the case is āelection interferenceā. Judge Chutkan pointed out that criminal proceedings in the U.S. are public, therefore, choosing not to release evidentiary filings because the defendant is also a candidate in an election is depriving the public of information to which we are entitled, which is actually election interference.
Choosing not to endorse a candidate this year after unbroken decades of making an endorsement is absolutely a political choice/statement.
Bezos may be a businessman making business decisions but this one cost him roughly 10% of the WaPo subscriber base in 2 days. Not sure how much of a nothing burger that is to him.
This policy is being framed as WaPo no longer endorsing presidential candidates. Do they endorse candidates in other races? If so, itās pretty clearly not a truly principled decision.
āLeaning left as opposed to what, the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner?ā
No, opposed to a recognized midpoint baseline that shifts according to the political issues of the current day (called the Overton Window). Basically, itās normalized for the current political environment. The Post has been left of center for my 50 years of it being my āhome paperā.
The Post is orange. The Times is red. The Examiner is brown. The scales on both axis are clearly defined.
The second part of your response is a bit befuddling to me. The conservative movement here in the US has descended into a chaos that is unrecognizable to the conservative viewpoints I held 45 years ago and is increasingly recognizable to some of the most alarming and dangerous societal constructs witnessed worldwide over the last 100+ years. Iāve alluded to this understanding many times and have even talked openly here about my deep grief over the actions of many of my friends that share my theological beliefs that call themselves conservatives but are clearly something else entirely.
And, specifically to your āobservationsā comment, let me be clear. I donāt have a complete understanding of just about anything. I have my observations and I have my understandings based on observations + biases I carry into every thought and conversation. Just like everyone else. Knowing that, I seek information, conversation, discourse from people Iāve learned to trust over the years if I think I am not seeing the whole picture. Which is what I did here. And, Iāll be uncertain about it by using uncertain terms like, āI donāt understandā or āIām not sureā and then let yāall see what I see. I didnāt see the billionairesplain construct in Bezosā editorial and @AAndy gave me some insight (although I am not sure I completely agree) and now I see it a little better and I am grateful for his investment in doing to with me. I see your comments about the state of conservatism and all I can think is, āyeah, I literally live that every day in my communities and have directly so in the workplaceā. So, I donāt understand what you mean by me seeking some refuge. I have a long history with the Post. Some of my friends over there think this is the right move. Others do not and have left. Some of the comments here have moved me off of my ānothing burgerā initial thoughts. Some of yours are just confusing to me as I try to connect my comments with yours.
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I get this. I tend to read the post for its news reporting and stay away from the editorial side since itās pretty predictable to me. The editorial side over there is pretty one-dimensional and itās easy to understand why some (a lot) of people would be unhappy with a perceived outside influence tampering with that side of the shop. Bezos and Lewis have been exerting increasing influence on ops and content over there for 10 months now and people continue to leave because of it. I suspect they are not done and I also expect the impacts on customer demographics are not done yet either.
This sort of scatter plot purporting to show the relative left/right bias of different media sources is meaningless. There is no political spectrum defined by right and left anymore. That paradigm has gone away. Ronald Reagan would not win a Republican primary for any statewide much less national office. The radical shift in the foundation and framing of political discourse over the last forty or fifty years, call it an Overton Window if you like, has made formerly useful concepts such as conservative and progressive utterly meaningless.
Again, there is one group of people that seeks to use their access to legislative and executive power to make citizensā lives safer and more prosperous. And there is another group of people that seeks to use their access to these same powers to administer punishment and bring misery to their perceived enemies, enemies defined for them by an enormous misinformation apparatus whose output this group consumes like an opiate to the exclusion of anything else.
Insisting that a publication like the Post āleans leftā is, in this environment, completely ridiculous. āLeans leftā is, after some decades of aggressive goalpost relocation, what would formerly have been described as āparticipates largely in objective reality.ā
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Only a week until the end of the election voting window.
Also, a whole nother week until the end of the election voting window.
50 million votes cast already.
This is Harrisā standard stump speech but, just like a band on tour, the performance has been honed through practice and the set list is tight.
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Exactly! I had a subscription to the Washington Post, not the Bezos Blog. If the policy was changed to one of āNo Endorsementsā all along, the Editorial staff should have known long before they wrote the endorsement.
I donāt give a shit about Amazon or Blue Origen. As a Washington Post subscriber, the fate of those companies is only news, not determinative of what news I get. Will the Washington Post be honest in their coverage of those companies or Bezos himself? I doubt it. If Trump wins, will Bezos force a change or a retraction to a story that he thinks might adversely affect his other businesses? The answer is probably yes.
Iām getting pretty sick of the notion that thereās no fucking difference between Harris and Trump.
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