The Right Side of the News

Percy's tip for President was being interviewed on Fox News last week. Thankfully, Fox presented the coverage in a Fair and Balanced way, unlike the liberal Fake News outlets:

I've got to be honest, what you consider 'the usual right wing publications' are what I would term 'tabloid sensationalists and the lunatic fringe'. Right-wing journalism, as opposed to clickbait and fabricated nonsense, I would tend to look for in places like the Times (London), Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and National Review.

What the hell did I just watch? Was that some TV presenters being interviewed in Congress about their social media accounts?

I didn't mean to ask 'why were you posting the video' so much as 'why does the video exist'? As in 'Why on earth is the US congress grilling semi-celebrities on their social media accounts'?

The original judicial decision that established due process was necessary for revoking a White House press pass was posted by Percy upthread. The journalist in that case, incidentally, was denied his press pass by the Johnson and Carter White Houses. Not everything is a matter of liberal vs conservative.The White House takes away a press pass; judge notes that according to precedent there are more steps needed to take away a White House press pass. I don't see what's either wacko or liberal about that.Can't help but feel the whole thing is being made into a bit of an unnecessary mountain. This is hardly a great attack on press freedoms. Trump rarely gives press conferences anyway; and as Robert Sherrill (the journalist whose case set the original precedent) noted when explaining why he never applied for a White House press pass after winning his case:

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I had been in Washington long enough to realize that was the last place to waste your time sitting around for some dumb fuck to give a press conference.

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Percy's original post
The Atlantic article he referenced.
Some detail on the original ruling from a website about US case law

I'm not sure if you've left this post as a placeholder and intend to edit it with details later, but if you're remembering some poll reporting 85% of voters being in favour of Trump's wall I've no idea where you got it from.I found a Pew poll in which 39% said they thought a border wall was very or somewhat important, but that's almost two years old. A Rasmussen survey from the middle of last year 37% said they thought the wall should be built. Trump traditionally performs better on Ramsussen surveys than the other major polling organisations since they report only the views of those who report themselves 'likely voters'; as opposed to all citizens or all adults as is more common in other firms.In a poll commissioned by CBS (and carried out by SSRS) earlier this year 35% of respondents favoured building the wall.According to a Quinnipiac poll earlier this year, 37% of voters support the wall.The highest support figures for a wall on the US-Mexican border I found in any poll (not an exhaustive search) was a poll commissioned by Fox News back in 2006, in which 50% supported a wall.If the sources you're restricting yourself to are telling you that 85% of Americans support the building of a border wall, you're not shielding yourself from liberal propaganda - you're shielding yourself from the real world.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.Edited by caffeine, : Somehow made a right messEdited by caffeine, : No reason given.

This seems to be clutching at straws a little - covering up affairs is hardly 'obtaining the Presidency by fraudulent means'; unless we're taking the view that all lies told during a campaign amount to this. In which case pretty much every politician is guilty.

I don't know the details of American law well enough to comment on whether or not it's legally an impeachable offense. I just think that 'lying to the American people' is de rigeur practice for a politician running for election; and am not seeing the earth-shattering importance that you're attributing to it. It looks more like seeking hard to find technical violations of the law in reaction to the fact that there's a worthless scumbag in the White House. This is all speculation of course, but I think it would have made the square root of fuck all difference. It has never been a secret that Trump is a philanderer. Those who voted for him either don't consider this important; believe that the importance of the positions they share outweigh any personal failings; or opt for denial and willful blindness to avoid any cognitive dissonance. The accusations of Trump's affair with Stormy Daniels stem from 2011; and resurfaced and were discussed at length in 2016 during the election. What difference did they make?ABE: It's instructive to note that, while Trump's overall approval rating is low, his approval rating amongst people who voted for him in 2016 is remarkably stable. What difference did it make when Stormy Daniels did go public? As noted, Trump voters either don't care or don't believe - I don't know why you think this would be different at any other time.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

Stormy Daniels confirmed the allegations after the election. The rumours stem from 2011, and http://thesmokinggun.com/...-1were reported in October 2016. The very Wall Street Journal article which reported on Karen MacDougall's story in November mentioned it.

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Mr. Davidson also represented Stephanie Clifford, a former adult-film star whose professional name is Stormy Daniels and who was in discussions with ABC’s Good Morning America in recent months to publicly disclose what she said was a past relationship with Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with the talks.

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Jacob Weisberg of Slate explained why he didn't bother running with the story.

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Given what was going on in the final weeks of the campaign, during which Trump was facing a torrent of accusations of sexual abuse, I didn't think an extramarital affair would be a highly significant story.

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I wasn't talking about his overall approval rating. I was talking about his support amongst those who voted for him in 2016, which is considerably less than 36,5% of the electorate. I'm unable to find where I got this from though.

I think people overanalyse the referendum result in a lot of ways. One of the best predictors of someone's vote in the referendum was wealth. The less money someone had, the more likely they were to vote Leave.People whose lives were comfortable tended to vote to keep on as we are. People who were struggling economically voted for change. I think it's pretty much as simple as that.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

I can't help but feel that this is a problem. I haven't followed the details of this story so I don't know all the facts; but it appears to be a story about some children being mean to someone.All this argument about whether the children really were mean or not seems to me to be missing the more important point - if this is a major story in serious, national newspapers; then you have a deeply dysfunctional press. Using longer words and more complex sentence structure to cover exactly the same sort of clickbait as a crappy, sensationalist shitrag does not make you a respectable newspaper.

I was trying to make the point Phat made a bit later: except I wouldn't say 'overzealous', I'd say 'venal'. This is, as Phat says, a total non-event. I could not give two short shits who was in the right or the wrong here; since I can't see how it matters. What happened here is that some children and an old man had a disagreement. Maybe some or all of the parties involved behaved inappropriately - who knows, and who the fuck cares? No one got hurt. It's not international news; it's not national news; it's not even local news. It's something that happened somewhere.And yet, it's full of button-pushing, buzzword triggers for people on various sides of the political spectrum, and this is why the media seized on it. It's a petty way to generate revenue without wasting time or expense on journalism. There's no work involved into making it a story; you just chuck it out there, like throwing red meat to a bunch of wolves, and watch the internet explode while people rant and foam in pathetic partisan outrage.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.Edited by caffeine, : Somehow there was a word missing in the middle there

Of course there are people who believe we should move away from capitalism. If those people are not part of 'the left' then I have no idea what that term is meant to refer to. A quarter of the respondents to the Fox poll said yes; while more than a third did the previous time they asked it.'The left' doesn't have beliefs, on account of being a very broad and ill-defined political category made up of millions of very different people with very different political viewpoints.

'The left' without qualification is a very broad sense. I'm nor insisting it can only be used in that way, but if you're using a narrower context, such as 'the left of the US Congress' then it would help to specify. Well, this seems to be a regular question on the Fox News poll which they'd asked repeatedly over the past decade; rather than just being something related to current political debate. And the answers seem to suggest that 'moving away from capitalism' is not just a weird fringe opinion. Quite a few Americans seem to like the suggestion; with the highest response in favour being the 36% who said it would be a good thing on the 2018 survey.