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      DC media makes meal of supposed Sotomayor restaurant sighting

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      DC media makes meal of supposed Sotomayor restaurant sightingNewsletter reports supreme court justice dined with Democrats after incorrectly identifying Chuck Schumer’s wife as the justice

      Ted Cruz seeks to move on from Tucker Carlson mauling
      The most Washington website of all was forced to issue a diplomatic correction on Saturday, in a second recent iteration of perhaps the most Washington story of all: mistaken reporting about diners at Le Diplomate, a restaurant popular with DC politicos.‘When QAnon and the Tea Party have a baby’: Ron Johnson will run again for US SenateRead moreThe website in question was Politico, the capital and Capitol-covering tipsheet which with characteristic capitals informed readers of its Playbook email: “SPOTTED: Speaker NANCY PELOSI, Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER, Sen[ators] AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-Minn) and DICK DURBIN (D-Ill) and Justice SONIA SOTOMAYOR dining together at Le Diplomate on Friday night.”The email also offered readers a “pic from our intrepid tipster”.Alas, it did not show Sotomayor.The “pic” showed French café tables, waiters, diners and a woman turning from her dessert to talk to Klobuchar, who was maskless and sitting opposite a masked-up Durbin. Schumer’s distinctive hairline could be seen next to Durbin and Pelosi could be seen, also maskless, to the right of a dark-haired woman with her back turned: supposedly the supreme court justice.Politico might have paused before pressing send. Not only could the supposed Sotomayor’s face not be seen but only last month another supposed scandal at “Le Dip” proved to be a “le flop”.Then, a former Republican aide tweeted that Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, had been turned away.In fact, they were being seated outside. Politico covered the slip, reporting: “Within minutes we at Playbook were looped into this seemingly momentous news and were pretty excited ourselves to write about it today. Alas, our enthusiasm was dashed when we heard back from a Buttigieg spox who said there was nothing to it.”On Friday, a Sotomayor sighting would have been news. One of three liberal justices on the supreme court, she had not appeared in person for oral arguments earlier, over Joe Biden’s Covid vaccine mandate for private employers.Furthermore, in that hearing she had made an inaccurate claim about the Omicron-fuelled Covid-19 surge, saying: “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”As the Washington Post fact-checker put it, that was “wildly incorrect”, as “according to HHS data, as of 8 January there are about 5,000 children hospitalised … either with suspected Covid or a confirmed laboratory test”.The Politico photo also came amid continuing speculation about when or if another liberal, Stephen Breyer, might retire, thereby giving Joe Biden a pick for the court before possible loss of the Senate. Schumer would shepherd any nominee into place.Alas for Politico, it soon became clear its tipster was wrong. The woman in the picture was Iris Weinshall, the chief operating officer of the New York Public Library, who is married to Schumer. A correction ensued but to make matters worse, Weinshall was initially identified only by her husband’s name. To make matters worse still, Schumer’s office told other outlets that unlike in le grande affaire de Buttigieg, Politico had not called to check on the tip from “Le Dip”.Politico acknowledged the slip and said standards had not been met.“We deeply regret the error,” it said.TopicsWashington DCUS politicsSonia SotomayorUS supreme courtChuck SchumerNancy PelosiAmy KlobucharnewsReuse this content More

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      One in three Americans say violence against government justified – poll

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      One in three Americans say violence against government justified – pollWashington Post releases survey showing ‘considerably higher’ number saying it is sometimes right to take up arms

      The Steal: stethoscope for a democracy near cardiac arrest
      One in three Americans believe violence against the government is sometimes justified, according to a new Washington Post poll.Trump acolytes vie for key election oversight posts in US midtermsRead moreThe survey, with the University of Maryland, was released on New Year’s Day – five days short of a year since rioters attacked the US Capitol in an attempt to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat by Joe Biden.According to the authors of The Steal, a new book on Republican attempts to fulfill Trump’s aim through legal action in key states, the rioters of 6 January 2021 “had no more chance of overthrowing the US government than hippies in 1967 had trying to levitate the Pentagon”.But it was still by far the most serious attack on the seat of federal government since the British burned Washington in 1814 and the Post poll comes amid a sea of warnings of growing domestic strife, even of a second civil war.The Post reported: “The percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34%, which is considerably higher than in past polls by the Post or other major news organisations dating back more than two decades.“… The view is partisan: The new survey finds 40% of Republicans, 41% of independents and 23% of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified.”Other polls have found that more than half of Republicans believe Trump’s lie that Biden won the White House thanks to electoral fraud, and do not trust elections.As pointed out by Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague, authors of new book The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and People Who Stopped It, Trump was ultimately stopped by “the integrity of hundreds of obscure Americans from every walk of life, state and local officials, judges and election workers. Many of them … Republicans, some … Trump supporters”.Nonetheless, at a rally near the White House on 6 January, Trump told such supporters to “fight like hell” in his cause.“And if you don’t fight like hell,” he said, “you’re not going to have a country anymore”.Five people died, including a rioter shot by law enforcement and a police officer.The Post poll found that 60% of Americans said Trump bore a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the Capitol attack. However, 72% of Republicans and 83% of Trump voters said he bore “just some” responsibility or “none at all”.The Post reported: “A majority continue to say that violence against the government is never justified – but the 62% who hold that view is a new low point, and a stark difference from the 1990s, when as many as 90% said violence was never justified.”The paper interviewed some respondents.Phil Spampinato, 73, from Dover, Delaware, and a political independent, said he first “contemplated the question of whether violence against the government might be justified” as a way of “defending your way of life” after he saw Republicans changing state laws to restrict voting by Democrats and to make it easier to overturn results.US ‘closer to civil war’ than most would like to believe, new book saysRead more“Not too many years ago,” Spampinato said, “I would have said that those conditions are not possible, and that no such violence is really ever appropriate.”Anthea Ward, a Republican 32-year-old mother of two from Michigan, said: “The world we live in now is scary. I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist but sometimes it feels like a movie. It’s no longer a war against Democrats and Republicans. It’s a war between good and evil.”Ward said she did not approve of the Capitol attack. She also said she would not participate in violence over Covid-19 vaccine mandates – another social flashpoint.But, the Post reported, Ward did say other people could be justified in choosing to “express their second amendment right” if the government “infringe[d] their freedom of choice” over vaccines, “and nonviolent action such as protests were unsuccessful”.TopicsUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS press and publishingnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump challenges media and Democrats to debate his electoral fraud lie

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      Trump challenges media and Democrats to debate his electoral fraud lie
      Former president issues typically rambling statement
      Capitol attack: Schiff says Meadows contempt decision soon
      Donald Trump has challenged leading editors and politicians to debate him in public over his lie that Joe Biden beat him in 2020 through electoral fraud.In a typically rambling statement on Sunday, the former president complained about “the heads of the various papers [and] far left politicians” and said: “If anyone would like a public debate on the facts, not the fiction, please let me know. It will be a ratings bonanza for television!”Can the Republican party escape Trump? Politics Weekly Extra – podcastRead moreDespite Trump’s insistence that “the 2020 election was rigged and stolen” – and his well-known fixation on TV ratings – it was not.Even William Barr, an attorney general widely seen as willing to run interference for Trump, publicly stated there was no evidence of widespread electoral fraud.Biden beat Trump by more than 7m in the popular vote and by 306-232 in the electoral college, a result Trump called a landslide when he beat Hillary Clinton by it in 2016. Clinton also beat him in the popular vote.Trump’s proposal of a public debate – which seemed unlikely to bear fruit – extended to what he called “members of the highly partisan unselect committee of Democrats who refuse to delve into what caused the 6 January protest”.The attack on the US Capitol, Trump said, was caused by “the fake election results”.In a way, he was right. It was his lies about the election which led to the deaths of five people around the attack on Congress by a mob seeking to stop certification of Biden’s win, some chanting that Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, should be hanged.At a rally near the White House shortly before the riot, Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” in his cause. He was impeached for inciting an insurrection but acquitted when only seven GOP senators found him guilty, not enough to convict.On Sunday, Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee and a member of the 6 January panel, told CNN: “We tried to hold the former president accountable through impeachment. That’s the remedy that we have in Congress. We are now trying to expose the full facts of the former president’s misconduct as well as those around him.”To adapt the Tennessee Republican Howard Baker’s famous question about Richard Nixon and Watergate, the House committee is focusing on what Trump knew about plans for protest and possible violence on 6 January – and when he knew it.00:45Numerous Trump aides and allies have been served with subpoenas. Most, like the former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress in the first such case since 1983, have refused to cooperate.‘The goal was to silence people’: historian Joanne Freeman on congressional violenceRead moreSchiff said a decision on a possible contempt charge for Mark Meadows, Trump’s last White House chief of staff, would likely be made in the coming week.It seems unlikely any senior figure in the US media or among Democrats in Congress or state governments will take up Trump’s challenge to debate him in public.Observers including the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who helped Trump prepare for his debates against Biden, agree that a near-berserk performance in the first such contest did significant damage to Trump’s chances of re-election.At one point on a chaotic evening in Cleveland in September, Biden was so exasperated as to plead: “Would you shut up, man? This is so unpresidential.”TopicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS elections 2020US politicsUS CongressUS press and publishingDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      FBI failed to act on tips of likely violence ahead of Capitol attack – report

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      US Capitol attackFBI failed to act on tips of likely violence ahead of Capitol attack – report
      Washington Post publishes wide-ranging report on Capitol riot
      ‘Roadmap for a coup’: inside Trump plot to steal the presidency
      Reuters in WashingtonSun 31 Oct 2021 15.32 EDTThe FBI and other key law enforcement agencies failed to act on a host of tips and other information ahead of 6 January that signaled a potentially violent event might unfold that day at the US Capitol, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.Republican Adam Kinzinger: I’ll fight Trumpism ‘cancer’ outside CongressRead moreAmong information that came officials’ way in the weeks before what turned into a riot as lawmakers met to certify the results of the presidential election was a 20 December tip to the FBI that supporters of Donald Trump were discussing online how to sneak guns into Washington to “overrun” police and arrest members of Congress, according to internal bureau documents obtained by the Post.The tip included details showing those planning violence believed they had orders from the president, used code words such as “pickaxe” to describe guns, and posted the times and locations of four spots around the country for caravans to meet the day before the joint session.On one site, a poster specifically mentioned Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah, as a target, the Post said.Romney was later one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump on one charge of inciting an insurrection, leveled by the House of Representatives during a second impeachment of the former president.An FBI official who assessed the tip noted that its criminal division received a “significant number” of alerts about threats to Congress and other government officials. The FBI passed the information to law enforcement agencies in Washington but did not pursue the matter, the Post said.“The individual or group identified during the assessment does not warrant further FBI investigation at this time,” the internal report concluded, according to the Post. Trump seeking to block call logs and notes from Capitol attack panelRead moreThat detail was among dozens included in the report, which the newspaper said was based on interviews with more than 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings.A special congressional committee is investigating events which exploded into violence after a rally Trump held near the White House to rail against the results of the election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.Four people died on 6 January, one shot by police and the others of natural causes. More than 100 police officers were injured, one dying the next day. Four officers have since taken their own lives.More than 600 people have been charged with taking part in the violence.TopicsUS Capitol attackFBIUS politicsThe far rightWashington PostUS press and publishingUS crimenewsReuse this content More

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      Wall Street Journal criticized for Trump letter pushing election lie

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      Wall Street JournalWall Street Journal criticized for Trump letter pushing election lieFormer president’s letter, written in response to an editorial on Pennsylvania voting laws, contains a list of disproved claims Adam Gabbatt@adamgabbattThu 28 Oct 2021 11.35 EDTLast modified on Thu 28 Oct 2021 11.37 EDTThe Wall Street Journal has been criticized after it published a letter by Donald Trump in which the former president continued to push his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”.The former president’s letter, written in response to a WSJ editorial about voting law in Pennsylvania, claims, wrongly, that “the election was rigged, which you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured out”.How a secretive conservative group influenced ‘populist’ Trump’s tax cutsRead moreThe 600-word letter contains a bullet-point list of disproved claims – many of which have been debunked by WSJ reporters – which Trump claims show there was voter fraud. There was no widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, as several independent and partisan reviews have confirmed.Several WSJ reporters were unhappy with the publication of the letter, CNN reported, which comes after what had been a successful few weeks for the WSJ, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The newspaper’s Facebook Files investigation revealed, through internal documents, how high-profile users were not subject to the same standards as regular users, and that Facebook was aware that Instagram, which it owns, is toxic for teenage girls.The decision to publish Trump’s spurious letter threatens to undermine that journalism, despite a newspaper’s editorial board typically being separate from the newsroom.Trump remains banned from Twitter and Facebook, and has been reduced to sending daily emails to supporters to make his voice heard. The WSJ’s publication of the letter was swiftly criticized in the media world.“I think it’s very disappointing that our opinion section continues to publish misinformation that our news side works so hard to debunk,” an unnamed WSJ reporter told CNN. “They should hold themselves to the same standards we do!”Bill Grueskin, a Columbia University School of Journalism professor who served as deputy managing editor of the Journal, told the Washington Post that letters to the editor are often used as a place for readers to express dissatisfaction with a newspaper’s coverage.“That’s generally fine, but if someone is going to spout a bunch of falsehoods, the editor usually feels an obligation to trim those out, or to publish a contemporaneous response. The Wall Street Journal editorial page chose not to do that in this case,” Grueskin said.Other journalists weighed in on Twitter.“Most newspapers don’t allow op-ed writers to just make up nonsense lies. Apparently the Wall Street Journal is not among them,” SV Dáte, a HuffPost White House correspondent, wrote.Matt Fuller, who covers politics for the Daily Beast, posted: “Newspapers don’t exist so that powerful people can publish whatever lies they want. In fact, that may be one of the very opposite reasons newspapers exist.”The WSJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.TopicsWall Street JournalDonald TrumpUS elections 2020US press and publishingNewspapers & magazinesNewspapersnewsReuse this content More

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      The media is lambasting Biden over Afghanistan. But he should stand firm | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      OpinionUS newsThe media is lambasting Biden over Afghanistan. He should stand firmBhaskar SunkaraThe president was right to withdraw the US from Afghanistan – and he’s being skewered for it

      I served with Nato in Afghanistan – it was a bloated mess
      Sun 29 Aug 2021 08.11 EDTLast modified on Sun 29 Aug 2021 08.12 EDTWhen Joe Biden, a conventional politician if there ever was one, said he was concluding the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan this month, in line with plans set in motion by the Trump administration, the response from the mainstream press was hostile. Following the Taliban takeover of the country, the tenor has only grown more hyperbolic.Joe Biden says new Kabul terror attack highly likely in next 24 to 36 hoursRead moreDuring the Trump years, publications like the New York Times and Washington Post presented themselves as the last defenses of freedom against creeping authoritarianism. The latter adopted a new slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness”, and spent millions on a Super Bowl ad featuring Tom Hanks extolling the importance of journalism as a profession.But for all this talk of “defending freedom”, the mainstream media has a history of reflexively defending militarism, foreign interventions and occupations. Biden – who dared fulfil a campaign promise and end America’s longest war – is learning this the hard way.As Eric Levitz recounts in New York Magazine, the media has created a public backlash against Biden, with outlets like the Times calling the withdrawal a humiliating fiasco. For the New York Times Editorial Board, the two-decade occupation of Afghanistan is described as a “nation-building project” that reflected “the enduring American faith in the values of freedom and democracy”.Key to the media narrative is the echoing of “experts” on Afghanistan like former ambassador Ryan C Crocker, who wishes in another Times op-ed that instead of bolting after a couple of decades, US troops might have remained in Afghanistan for more than a half-century, as we’ve done on the Korean peninsula. Crocker regrets that “Mr Biden’s decision to withdraw all US forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure”.But as the writer Jeet Heer points out, the status quo was far from “affordable” for ordinary Afghans. The tragic figure of more than 2,000 dead US troops pales in comparison to the more than 200,000 Afghans killed since 2001. Indeed, prolonged civil war has put this year on pace to be the bloodiest for civilians as a failed US client state has overseen plummeting social indicators, widespread corruption and a total breakdown in public safety.The media had ignored the mounting chaos for years, only to laser-focus on it as a means to criticize Biden. They’ve ignored their own role in cheerleading a misguided “War on Terror” and pinned the blame for two decades of imperial hubris on the president who finally made good on promises to leave the country against the wishes of even some in his own party.What’s underlying much of the approach is a mainstream media fidelity to “expert” consensus. Many who presented themselves as fierce truth-tellers in the face of Trump hold the opinions of former intelligence and military officials in higher regard than that of a president democratically elected by 81.3 million people and pursuing a policy supported by 70% of Americans.Not only are corporate media pundits and talking heads wrong to advocate staying in Afghanistan, they’ve been wrong about generations of conflicts that ordinary people have opposed. Contrary to the popular imagination, opposition to wars from Vietnam to Iraq were spearheaded by workers, not the rich and the professional classes that serve them. It’s this general aversion to costly overseas conflict that the president should confidently embrace.Biden has never been a very good populist. For all his “Amtrak Joe” pretenses, he’s a creature of the Beltway, the ultimate establishment politician. It’s no surprise that his administration appears paralyzed in the face of criticism from its erstwhile elite allies. But unless he manages to push back against the narratives mounting against his administration, he’ll risk undermining his popular domestic agenda as well.Joe Biden did something good – and the media want to kill him for it. He should embrace their scorn and defend his actions to the American people.
      Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin magazine and a Guardian US columnist. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
      TopicsUS newsOpinionJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsUS press and publishingNew York TimesWashington PostcommentReuse this content More