VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump’s press secretary humiliates herself at podium
When faced with a sharp question about Trump's crypto corruption schemes, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gave an answer that would make a North Korean propagandist blush.
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Why is Trump so fixated on toys for little girls?
Moira Donegan, The Guardian: "Donald Trump has found a new target for his trademark mockery and dismissal: little girls. In comments at a 30 April cabinet meeting, the president seemed to dismiss the economic impact of his chaotic tariff regime on American consumers by citing girls as the primary complainants. “Somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open,” Trump said. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.” Trump is prone to odd non-sequiturs, but the dolls have become something of a sticking point. Onboard Air Force One on 4 May, he doubled down on his insistence that American girls should have fewer toys. “All I’m saying is that a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, nine-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls,” he told reporters. “She could be very happy with two or three or four or five.” The selection of dolls, in particular, as Trump’s stand-in for consumer prices reflects the gendered ideas about work, money and purchasing that animate Trump’s chaotic economic policy. After all, Trump did not talk about the impact of his trade regime on toy trucks or GI Joe action figures – and he certainly didn’t mention its likely impact on things like video games, basketballs, squat racks or protein powders. He didn’t talk about any of the consumption that Americans are uniformly agreed to think of as reasonable, dignified or aspirational. He chose, instead, something seen as trivial, childlike, and only for girls. The comments aim to cast the pain that consumers will face as ultimately feminine and frivolous, their complaints petulant and childlike. This is the vision for your children’s future that the Trump administration wants to put forward: deprived of material comforts and joy in childhood, then deprived of the hope for upward mobility in adulthood. They want you, and your kids, to be poor, desperate and ignorant. They want you to work in repetitive, dangerous, back-breakingly physical jobs, and they want you to have no aspiration to anything better. They want you to imagine your future, and your children’s futures, not as an open horizon of freedom and potential, but as a dark and desperate struggle, devoid of the notion that we might be anything more than useful instruments for the needs of capital. What do they offer Americans as compensation for this loss? Virtually nothing, aside from misogynist contempt, and the assurance that as our living standards sink and our prospects disappear, in our suffering, at least, we are masculine."
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Marine veteran answers call to resist Trump
JoAnna Mendoza for Congress: JoAnna Mendoza served our country for twenty years as a drill sergeant in the United States Marines, training the brave men and women who defend our country overseas, and now she’s ready to defend our nation from Donald Trump’s extremism in the halls of Congress. As a lifelong public servant, JoAnna refuses to sit idly by while Donald Trump and Elon dismantle the systems that provide for our veterans after their service and send countless more vets to the unemployment line with their gutting of the federal government. Will you chip in to help Joanna flip this winnable red seat and take back control of Congress from the GOP?
Mainstream media’s anti-Palestinian double standard is on full display
Adam Johnson, In These Times: "Newly elected U.S. Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) has been launching unhinged racist attacks against Rep. Rashida Tlaib and the Muslim and Arab community writ large for years. But one would hardly be aware of this troubling reality by consuming mainstream U.S. media, which has decided it’s not worthy of reporting — much less condemnation or outrage. Fine has called Tlaib 'a terrorist' who 'shouldn’t be American.' (Tlaib was born in Detroit.) He has advocated running over and killing pro-Palestine protesters, called Palestinians “animals,” referred to Muslims as “rapists,” and — as of late — openly cheer-leads starving civilians in Gaza. The response from U.S. media has been to completely ignore it. Fine’s bigoted attack on a fellow Congressperson, to say nothing of his advocating mass starvation, wasn’t reported on at all by The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, Politico, Axios, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, CBS News or ABC News. This amounted to a total mainstream media blackout on this clear-as-day act of racist incitement. Contrast this silence with the week-long media meltdown last September when Rep. Tlaib suggested that Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel filed charges against pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan because she was possibly biased against pro-Palestine protesters. This comment turned out to be completely vindicated after a Nessel-led prosecution raided and arrested seven pro-Palestine protesters in a pre-dawn raid last month. (The charges were later dropped after Nessel was pressured to recuse herself for alleged bias.) But at the time, despite the interviewer himself defending Tlaib, the Congresswoman’s remarks solicited multiple instances of media hand-wringing about Tlaib’s alleged antisemitism in USA Today, Newsweek, Fox News and The Free Press,. This culminated with a particularly sleazy smear campaign from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, which outright asserted Tlaib was an anti-Jewish bigot. This was is addition to the torrent of articles and segments in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, Axios, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, CBS News, and ABC News in late 2023 lamenting Tlaib’s alleged, or perceived, antisemitism because she supports freedom for everyone 'from the River to the Sea.' Comments from Tlaib, Omar and anyone in Congress vaguely sympathetic to Palestine are pored over, hyper-analyzed, interpreted in the least generous way possible, turned into meta-scandals, spurring censure votes in the House of Representatives and Official Condemnations from Democrats, thus spurring even more media cycles creating a fever pitch of innuendo, panicked responses and vibes-based denouncements. This outsized response then gives the public the vague impression that antisemitism on the Left is out of control and unchecked. Plumes and plumes of smoke with very little, if any, fire."
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The Trump atrocity happening in plain sight on the media’s watch
James North, The New Republic: "A recently published study in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet reports that the Trump administration’s evisceration of the landmark President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, program that has long been a xxxxxx in the fight to combat global HIV/AIDS has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow. PEPFAR is, by far, the most successful U.S. foreign aid program in history. Since George W. Bush launched it in 2003, it has provided life-giving anti-retroviral, or ARV, medications that have already saved an estimated 26 million lives, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. That 26 million figure is no exaggeration or guesstimate—it has been confirmed in multiple scientific reports. PEPFAR has also prevented some 5.5 million mother-to-child transmissions of the deadly virus. For these reasons, it’s shocking that the U.S. mainstream media is barely reporting on the PEPFAR crisis. This media malpractice contrasts decisively with the American press’s blanket coverage some decades ago, when HIV/AIDS was scything its way across Africa, killing more than two million people a year. The lack of attention now raises the uncomfortable suspicion that people in the global south are interesting to the American media only when they are dying in large numbers."
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