* * *
At The Pearly Gates |
| Dowd's column is titled 'Trump's Slavish Stupidity' |
If your religious beliefs include hope for ultimate admission to Heaven, be assured you won’t meet Donald Trump there. That’s what Maureen Dowd’s August 23 New York Times column suggests. Look for it at https://www.nytimes.com › opinion › trump-heaven
JL
* * *
When is ‘ENOUGH’ Enough? - You Can No Longer Sit Idly By
Professor Heather Cox Richardson’s August 21 posting warned us by writing that ‘The president of the United States is openly admitting that his party cannot win a free and fair election. Instead of appealing to voters with popular policies, he is calling for rigging our elections so that his party cannot lose. This appears to have been the plan all along. In July 2024, Trump told an audience of evangelical Christians that if they voted for him in November, “in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote." Wow!
There is a limit to the amount of lying and deceit that the American public will tolerate. Even Texans. Eventually their collective voices will scream out ‘ENOUGH!!’
But for that to happen, that public must be aware of how they have been hoodwinked, and for that to happen, the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech must be preserved. When news and opinion sites are threatened, it is time to react to such threats. (The President recently suggested that the FCC revoke the licenses of NBC and ABC.) You must become personally involved and not sit idly by.
The following day, August 22, Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘Letters from an American’ was all about what appears to be a ‘retribution presidency.’ We have never had that before. You cannot sit idly by and let it happen!
And her August 23 posting tells the larger story about how the Republicans came to put party over country and, now, how they have put power over everything.
Her ‘Letters from an American’ can be found at https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
You can no longer sit idly by.
Over the weekend, The New York Times reported on the Federal prosecutors who had successfully convicted many of the insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Many of them are now being fired after years of service.
And if you have time, check out where Paul Krugman (https://paulkrugman.substack.com/) skips economics and reports on August 25 about how the government is weaponizing its tools against those the President dislikes.
I repeat, you can no longer sit idly by.
JL
* * *
Nobody Said It Would be Easy
More and more internet news and opinion sites are curtailing what they provide without a paid-for subscription. They publish enough to serve as a ‘teaser’ and then it is goodbye to the freeloaders, like me, most of the time.
But some sites still provide generous amounts of information before asking for subscriptions or donations. They include Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘Letters from an American’ and the ‘Daily Kos.’ Their survival is important at a time when it is clear that President Trump is trying to lessen avenues of communication and do away with free elections as reported above.
Sources still accessible without a donation or subscription include mainstream media outlets CNN and MSNBC; they try to publish supposedly non-partisan daily news summaries online. And we still have the old-fashioned daily printed newspapers delivered to your doorstep that I repeatedly have urged all to subscribe to and to read.
JL
* * *
The Story That Won’t Go Away
Much of what President Trump has been busying himself with lately (Tariffs, Russia, Ukraine, Gaza) is aimed at diverting the headlines away from the story that just won’t go away, that of the mysteries surrounding the late Jeffrey Epstein.
Extreme right-wingers want every scintilla of information about him revealed, in the hope that some of it will implicate liberals and Democratic supporters and politicians. Most Republicans, however, would prefer the entire story to remain buried with Epstein, aware that a scandal might possibly involve members of their party as well, including President Trump.
The latest part of that saga, the just-released interview with Epstein’s imprisoned companion and associate, Ghilaine Maxwell, rather than clear things up has done the opposite. Here’s why.
Maxwell, serving prison time for her involvement in Epstein’s sex-trafficking, perjured herself extensively during her trial, firmly establishing her credentials as a liar, someone never to be believed. Anything she said, absolving Trump from anything more than a purely social relationship with Epstein, is what one would expect from a convict seeking a Presidential pardon, or a reduced sentence, and therefore can be ignored. She has already been rewarded with a transfer to a more benign prison environment.
Furthermore, the inteview was conducted by a Deputy Attorney General who had previously served as Trump’s personal attorney and knew exactly how to word his questioning of her to elicit answers that did not implicate the President. Earlier DOJ lawyers who had been working on the case and who had no prior connection to Trump, and would have been more objective in their questioning, had been fired.
Rather than resolve things, the release of the interview now leads one to treat it as a sloppy whitewash job and strengthen the suspicion that there really might be something significant being hidden. I do not believe that there is, but releasing the interview resolves nothing.
As icing on the cake, Maxwell voiced her opinion that Epstein did not commit suicide but was murdered, despite there being no evidence to support that conclusion. This serves to strengthen the suspicion that a living Jeffrey Epstein might have implicated others; murdering him prevented that from happening and would certainly serve to discourage anyone with such information today from speaking up and contradicting the whitewash job Maxwell promoted in the interview.
But as I said, I do not believe that there is anything being hidden, and that releasing the interview resolves nothing. Maxwell just wants to get out of jail and will say anything to further that goal.
JL
* * *
Timing is Important
When preparing the preceding piece, I recognized that the government traditionally sends out items it really doesn’t want to send out late on Friday afternoons, after those who might comment on them are already starting their weekend activities and might have an otherwise full plate (including stories to divert their attention?) sitting before them by Monday.
They doubled down on this for the Maxwell interview story by releasing it during the last two weeks of August, a time when many major commentators take off on vacations. You might note that the coverage of the Maxwell interview from many sources was by second-stringers, except for Katy Tur who was in the midst of her MSNBC Friday afternoon stint when the story was released. Example: At MSNBC, Alicia Melendez for Nicolle Wallace, and the guy who covered the LA wildfires (I forget his name) for Stepanie Ruhle. There’s more.
JL
* * *
Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it (Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.) If you want to send someone the blog, you can just tell them to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or you can provide a link to that address in your email to them.
There’s another, perhaps easier, method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog posting will be forwarded, along with a brief comment from you. Each will receive a link to click on that will directly connect them to the blog. Either way will work, sending them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com , or clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting.
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com
More on the Sources of Information on Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered daily ‘paper’ newspaper (now becoming the South Florida Sun Sentinel) and what appears in my daily email. Be aware that when I open that email, I take these steps:
1. I quickly scan the sources of the dozen or two emails I still get each day at my old email address to see from where they are being sent. Most are from vendors which I may have used years ago. Without reading 99% of them, I usually immediately delete them.
2. I then go to the email arriving at jacklippman18@gmail.com. Gmail enables ‘Promotion’ emails to be so designated and separated out. I believe their criteria are whether or not they end up asking for donations or if they are no more than advertisements. I ignore most of these ‘Promotion’ emails without reading them, deleting them. A very few, perhaps one or two a day, get moved over to the two or three dozen other emails which I will actually open.
3. Then I read my email.
Besides email, my other source of information is the Google search engine (or other search engines) where I can look up any subject I want.
Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). On occasion I might use such search results, but when I do, I will say that I am doing so. Generally, however, I try not to use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri.
After such ‘AI’ search results, there follows the other results of my search. Unlike the anonymous AI-generated summaries, the sources of these results are clearly indicated, giving them a greater credibility than the AI summary.
I feel that It comes down to who YOU want to be in the driver’s seat in seeking information: yourself or something else (Artificial Intelligence), the structure of which somewhere along the way had to have been created by others, with whose identity I am neither familiar nor comfortable. At least when I read a column by Timothy Snyder, for example, I know from where it comes, and to some extent, what to expect.
Caution should be exercised in using Artificial Intelligence.
JL
* * * *
No comments:
Post a Comment