I do get a little kick out of the daily emails from the NYT offering discounts to come back. And I'm going to finally cancel Vanity Fair. I've had the subscription for years and they used to have some very good articles in there, but no more. Yeah, its a magazine for the 1% totally, I knew that and enjoyed the pictures anyway. But now it's just nothing but fluff and apologia and self pity for "Democrats." All print media is hurting, I need to add my small part to that pain.

The Nation for now I will keep, I can spot the crap now and avoid those pieces. When the whole thing goes to ConservaDem land, and it's getting closer, they're gone too.

the first newspaper to actually run meaningful headlines calling out the endemic corruption of pay-to-play politics beholden to Big Money/Wall St with real, hard-hitting stories, but connected and explained in the simplest and clearest terms as the reason why the populace's standard of living (i.e. healthcare via insurance companies, bloated military budget, corporate tax breaks and deregulation of business, etc having a direct effect on every aspect of your life) had been eviscerated, will be the newspaper that will survive and thrive no matter what technology comes our way.

People are looking for news outlets to reflect back to them what they're going through in their own personal lives. And that means an explanation why there's such widespread inability to keep up with ever-rising housing/healthcare/student tuition costs and consumer and bank debt, etc.

Just like Bernie shredded the idea that a candidate had to grovel to Wall St and Corporate America for campaign donations by refusing their dirty money, and then being rewarded exponentially by people who are clamoring for such integrity, news outlets can start getting tough and adversarial toward the powers that be - and be rewarded handsomely for it.

There's a massive opportunity for any one of these on-life-support papers to fill the void, with the incentive of the Trump Fear now, to actually stop shirking their journalistic duties by running interference for the oligarchs with manufactured controversy, obfuscation and celebrity gossip, and begin honoring their Fourth Estate credo.

Just look at how well real, cutting edge, speak truth-to-power progressive online sites like TYT, Jimmy Dore, Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp are doing now. People will be seeking out more places like Democracy Now, the Intercept, The Real News, Counterpunch, in a time in which the MSM has become discredited to many.

Some big traditional news outlet, if they were to find such courage and intrepidity, stands to win big now.

and that reason was not entertainment or money making

The US media pack needs to rediscover its teeth, for the Sake of Democracy

Delicate power balance

But what of the bizarre chorus of whooping and clapping in the background? While the president-elect was ranting about Nazis, and Buzzfeed and China and the benefits of being pals with Putin, you could hear applause and cheers coming from the serried ranks of the press corps. It was as if Trump’s fan club had been allowed to penetrate the ranks of the fourth estate. In fact, as has since been reported, the Trump machine had packed the room with aides who laughed at some of Trump’s arch comments and heckled the odd reporter that appeared to be going off-piste.
This is dangerous for democracy – without a robust, assertive and challenging media to put the president of the US to the question, all is lost. This depressing little event brought to mind for me a quote from the late, great journalist, James Cameron. He described his dispiriting experiences of following the media pack from arranged presser to organised event: “Thus did we trot and bark around the caravan.”
The US media pack needs to rediscover its teeth, not least to remind the next president of the balance of power and the value of third-party media advocacy – the presence of people whose job it is to argue about issues they consider important. But it’s important for all our sakes as we hurtle into this new and worrying US political era.
So stop trotting and barking around Trump, US media folks. Please remember what you’re there for – to make politicians feel uncomfortable and ask the questions they don’t want you to, time and time again.

Glenn Greenwald's third book published in 2008

A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

First - Bush not a tragedy, but the tragedy of not acting properly after 9/11. Went for oil and world domination.

Almost 1/3 of that book was about Iran. Sy Hersh broke the story that plans to invade Iraq and they were later scrapped. Totally crazy. Zionist project. 3x size of Iraq a d 3x population

An article in TomDispatch. Intro by Tom and then the article.

Tomgram: Rajan Menon, The Iranian Connection in the Age of Trump

Begins with overviews of some of CIA overthrows of governments

Such thoughts came to my mind because, in today’s piece, Rajan Menon, author of The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, explores Donald Trump’s possible plans for tearing up (or living with) the Obama administration’s Iranian nuclear deal -- and for tearing into or living with Iran itself. After all, if there is one thing the men he’s appointing to his national security team seem to have in common, it’s their obvious Iranophobia. Their sky-high level of animus and anger toward that mid-sized regional power is, or at least should be, striking. It would be inconceivable, had the CIA, in cahoots with Britain’s MI6, on the orders of American President Dwight Eisenhower and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not taken out the popular elected government of Mohammad Mossadeq in August 1953. They did so in response to its nationalization of the properties of the British oil company we now know as BP. That CIA-engineered military coup, which put an autocratic and oppressive Shah firmly on the Peacock Throne for the next quarter century and consigned democracy to the trash heap of history, led directly to the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolution of 1979, the embassy hostage situation of that year, and all the decades of enmity that followed. The present Iranian situation -- now one of the most combustible on the planet, as Menon points out -- might as well be stamped “creation of the Great Satan.” But who would know it here? Who cares? Who remembers?

Those who forget history are fated to... well, perhaps be Trumped by it, as we may soon see. Tom

white house correspondents dinner, jeez even the building up of trump as a candidate, the MSM and TPTB are stronger together, the truth is the last story they will cover.