This willing of the press to get less than the story rather than the whole story is not new, but I haven’t seen this many high profile agencies willing to accept this arrangement.

Holding journalists to a higher standard is fine; describing their job as approaching that standard, or faulting Trump as some kind of buffoon for taking them as they are, strikes me as giving them far too much credit. 

More precisely, each branch of the Government is supposed to check the other, but partisan cheerleading by “journalists” has degraded that norm to a point where civil society needs to pick up the slack.

what the actual job of real journalists is (enforcing checks and balances, reporting facts, investigating, providing transparency).

Considering Glenn Thrush just got a promotion to the NYT after being outed as a partisan flak (which shouldn’t have even been necessary considering his transparent bias), I’m not optimistic about the institutional press’s ability to reform itself.

I always felt that certain technical limitations to effects and choreography in the Original Trilogy hampered Lucas’ ability to show Vader at his most wantonly brutal. It started to develop in the Duel on Mustafar in RotS (seriously, pay attention to the fight choreography after they step back outside—it’s probably…

donor-minded adults trying to rein in the organized musical id of too-smart-for-their-own-good college students. 

The dynamics of a Bernie-Trump campaign would have been quite different from those of the campaign we got, because Bernie’s message was much more well-tailored to the disaffected white working class types who swung the election for Trump. Given how much I was wrong about this year, I’m not confident in saying who…

Eichenwald is a delusional hack with a very questionable past, but I have little doubt the RNC would have burned Sanders to the ground without even trying.

Me neither, but when in Rome etc. etc.

How many Waltons, et al, would have to be killed before we saw actual change?

POLITICIANS ::clap:: ARE ::clap:: MORE ::clap:: POPULAR ::clap:: WHEN ::clap:: NOT ::clap:: RUNNING

Since when has the government declined to spend money on the basis of not actually having any?

He’s a patriot for Real America, and helped it Take Our Baseball Back from those coastal libruls. The Yankees even wear blue, just like those commucrats!

This

Depends on whether he stops in Baltimore first.

It happens, but only on the rarest of rare occasions. I’ve experienced it exactly once, when a flight from DCA to BDR was straight-up canceled about 2 hours before departure. I ended up on a half-empty flight to Albany instead and got bumped to first since there were plenty of open seats.

My read on the most recent election is that it goes beyond tolerance to outright denial and rationalization when it comes to “our” team. There are people in this very thread insisting that Clinton was totally a morally upright figure rather than a Nixonian paranoid who just happened to be better than a 2-bit…

“Purity” is definitely a foolish goal, but I do think a certain minimum level of ethical integrity is a fair thing to expect from our public servants. Neither candidate in the most recent presidential election possessed even that, regardless of what other flaws Trump exhibited.

I don’t really disagree that most politicians have varying degrees of ethical problems, but part of the root cause is the partisan tendency to excuse away lapses by “our” team. If we want voters to choose morally upright candidates, we have to give them morally upright candidates, which means weeding the less morally…