Throughout the day before the summit in Helsinki, the lead story on the New York Times home page stayed the same: “Just by Meeting With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead.” The Sunday headline was in harmony with the tone of U.S. news coverage overall. As for media commentary, the Washington Post was in the dominant groove as it editorialized that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is “an implacably hostile foreign adversary.”
Image: Matterhorn via Wikipedia
Contempt for diplomacy with Russia is now extreme. Mainline U.S. journalists and top Democrats often bait President Trump in zero-sum terms. No doubt Hillary Clinton thought she was sending out an applause line in her tweet Sunday night: “Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?”
Since early 2017, the U.S. mass media have laid it on thick with the rough political equivalent of a painting technique known as chiaroscuro – “the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition,” in the words of Wikipedia. The Russiagate frenzy is largely about punching up contrasts between the United States (angelic and victimized) and Russia (sinister and victimizer).
Often the biggest lies involve what remains unsaid. For instance, U.S. media rarely mention such key matters as the promise-breaking huge expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders since the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the brazen U.S. intervention in Russia’s pivotal 1996 presidential election, or the U.S. government’s 2002 withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, or the more than 800 U.S. military bases overseas — in contrast to Russia’s nine.
If the Democrats want to win control of the House in the fall, they need to have a plan, a positive vision, and a focus on issues that directly affect Americans. Not surprisingly, they are failing on all fronts.
I cover US politics for a living and, with less than five months to go before the crucial midterm election that will determine whether American voters will impose some checks on President Donald Trump, I couldn’t tell you what the Democrats’ platform is… or their plan for winning this November.
Instead of coming up with policies that will change the lives of Americans in a meaningful way — as well as a strategy of telling voters about them — they keep getting sucked into the Trump trap.
The president will do or say something that is so ridiculous or reprehensible that Democrats are sure that, this time, the public will surely realize that he is a know-nothing liar and demagogue who is destroying the US from within.
More from Klaus Marre and Donkeyhotey @ Whowhatwhy.org
Image: Rachel Maddow on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC. (Image: Screen shot via MSNBC / YouTube)
The most profound dangers from what Rachel Maddow and company are doing is what they least want to talk about—how the cumulative effects and momentum of their work are increasing the likelihood that tensions between Washington and Moscow will escalate into a horrendous military conflict.
Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will not submit a new Republican-drawn map of Pennsylvania’s congressional districts to the state’s high court, saying Tuesday that it uses the same unconstitutionally partisan tactics as the 6-year-old boundaries struck down in a gerrymandering case.
Wolf’s move came six days before the deadline set by the Democratic-majority state Supreme Court to impose new boundaries for Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts. However, Wolf’s office did not immediately say whether he would submit his own map to the court, and he has not publicly released his own proposed map.
Image: Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images
Redrawing the map of Pennsylvania districts could boost Democrats nationally in their quest to take control of the U.S. House, and leaves district boundaries up in the air barely three months before May’s primary election.
The governor said his office’s analysis of the plan put forward Friday night by leaders of the Republican-controlled Legislature concluded that it was clearly designed to help their own candidates.
The vote tallies for the runoff election in the Atlanta mayoral race are official, but with a razor-thin margin remaining, the trailing candidate said Monday that she plans to ask for for a recount.
Image: David Goldman/AP
Election officials in Fulton and DeKalb counties, which both include parts of Atlanta, certified their votes, which still have Keisha Lance Bottoms winning the race. Bottoms’ lead grew from 759 votes in unofficial tallies released last week to 832 votes in the certified results. That still amounts to less than 1 percent of the votes.
The candidates have 48 hours from the certification in each county to request a recount, and Mary Norwood told reporters she would likely do so Tuesday.
“It is absolutely imperative that we take a look at every single ballot,” Norwood said.
He enjoyed his win in the general election for Jackson mayor in the same place he celebrated a landslide victory in the primary a month earlier.
Image: Clarion Ledger
An energized Chokwe Antar Lumumba addressed a room of hundreds of supporters at the King Edward Hotel after defeating eight candidates in the democratic primary in May. But it was Tuesday’s celebration that solidified his position as Jackson’s next mayor.
“I’m really, really, really happy,” Lumumba said just before 9 p.m Tuesday. “At the same time, I don’t know it’s entirely sunk in yet.”
Tuesday’s general election, a ticket including a popular, well-known democrat and five virtually faceless opponents, was not expected to drive the same kind of excitement, or voters, as the primary.
Yet, more than 23,100 Jacksonians voted Tuesday for the 34-year-old defense attorney and son of late-Mayor Chokwe Lumumba — nearly 5,000 more than voted for him in the primary.
Image: Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images
