CNN is reporting the real reason Trump is closing the Kennedy Centre for two years is not for renovation: “the Kennedy Center does not have a 2026/2027 season. There would not have been any programming to announce."

those who predicted authoritarianism were both dismissed, & deeply misunderstood, by the media my latest for @newrepublic.com newrepublic.com/article/2042...

There is no strict Constitutional prohibition against pedophilia so it’s hard for me to understand the woke left’s obsession with the Epstein files. by Jonathan Turley

Inspiration: “This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” ―Winston Churchill

Maybe the third time's a charm 😄. Yesterday, I posted that we could eliminate things like country-name dropdowns and replace them with free text, perhaps using an LLM to correct errors. 1/8

Tonight the controversial US ambassador to Belgium Bill White was supposed to speak on a Film & Politics panel about European dependence. He pulled out last minute. So the moderator @elenasanchez.bsky.social asked the panellists what they would have said to him if he was there.

Latvian MEP @mstakis.bsky.social (former mayor of Riga) said "I would warn him that he is losing the people's hearts and minds in Europe dramatically." "For a country like mine which was the biggest fan of the US in Europe, the friends around me now feel completely differently."

"This is the strategic risk they fail to see," she said. Europe is going to get stronger from this, and the US will get weaker. It takes decades to build trust, and it's being lost rapidly" "The sense of the American dream which was so powerful for so long, is gone. But what is the european dream?"

Erika Staël von Holstein from the think tank @reimagineeuropa.bsky.social said that if the US Ambassador had turned up, "I would have said thank you for bringing us together and making us stronger. And it would have annoyed him."

“Doctors won’t tell you this, but you don’t need medication for a tapeworm—all you need is the natural power of friction,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said as he dropped to the floor, lifted his legs high, and dragged his ass along the White House carpet during a press conference.

The idea that the Court should operate entirely in secret is a modern phenomenon. The idea that the Court should be separated from the public is a modern phenomenon. Earlier generations did not accept a powerful, isolated & secretive Court and we shouldn't either 1/6 www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/u...

This is exactly why the "we're never going to have free elections again" stuff is so maddening and self-defeating. If we show up and we fight back, we'll win. If we lose ourselves down a rabbit hole of blueanon "he's going to cancel the election" nonsense, we won't win.

Neither Trump nor the GOP in congress have this power, & the only way they do this is if we decline to stand up for our rights. He's had a string of electoral defeats & rightfully fears the midterms. His outbursts are real threats, but they come from weakness. Tough shit, he's going down. No Kings.

Movie review from Guardian on Melania.

anybody else notice how Trump's economic golden age is always just around the corner?

Decades of slow and careful accumulation of soft power blown away like dandelion fluff because of one fucking guy.

What is "political" need not be politicized. This is a point I have tried to make again and again in my press criticism. When TV journalists with Sunday morning shows push back against major party candiates who are floating poisonous charges without evidence, that is a political act... 13/

Truth-seeking is what journalists see themselves as always doing. Find the truth. What could be simpler, right? Refuge-seeking includes common practices like false balance, "both sides do it," steering the story "down the middle," and the depiction of "dueling realities" in a divided nation. 12/

My favorite description of refuge-seeking behavior in journalism comes from a former reporter for the Washington Post, Paul Taylor, in his 1990 book about election coverage. I have quoted it many times. 11/

Jay's third key distinction: truth-seeking vs. refuge-seeking behavior in journalism. Truth-seeking needs no definition. It is finding out what actually happened— and telling us. Refuge-seeking involves telling the story in a way that protects against anticipated attacks... 10/

Media, journalism, and the press are not interchangeable terms. Yet they are bound up with one another. Media is the attention industry Journalism is a social practice The press is a key institution in a democracy Put it all together: Journalists who work in the media carry forward "the press." 9/

Most journalists are employees of the media, and thus part of the attention business. This creates endless problems and compromises, which I read and hear about nonstop. The press — to my way of thinking — is the institution that endures over time as journalists come in and out of it. 8/

Key distinction number two: journalism vs. the media (vs. the press) I think of the media as the attention business, an industry whose product is audiences. Journalism is a social practice, the purpose of which is to keep publics informed and hold power to account. 7/

Audience vs. public, cont. When people share common problems but don't realize it, they are an "inchoate" public. (John Dewey.) One reason the presidential debates used to be such a big deal is that they are one of the few occasions when the audience is the public and vice versa. 6/

And here we go with some key distinctions I use to do my work. An audience is not a public. "Audience" suggests people attending to a common object, typically a performance or spectacle. A public is people with different interests who live in the same space and share common problems. 5/

For those who don't know me, I recently retired as a journalism professor at NYU. I kept the role of press critic who writes about the media and politics, and journalism's struggle for survival. I have a PhD in media studies, and 35 years experience in puzzling through problems in press behavor. 4/

These notes about some of the distinctions I draw in order to do my work were written under the influence of two masters of the form: the French critic Roland Barthes, and the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, known for her striking distinctions— such as labor vs. work. 3/

For distinctions to do their work, the terms have to be sufficiently close so that prying them apart clears a space for thought. If I write, "bending is not the same as breaking, well, who said it was? That one is going nowhere. But "naked is not the same as nude..." That's an idea with legs. 2/

"When in doubt, draw a distinction." Not sure where he got it, but in grad school one of my teachers taught me that. This (long) thread is about the key distinctions I rely on as a critic. There's a Twitter version from 2021. This one builds on that one. I will post them one at a time. Ready?

If issues don't bear on common troubles, then focusing on "the issues" — as against the horse race — may not be the answer it seems to be. Also: Great journalism puts a spotlight on troubles and turns them into issues, which is exactly what the movie, "Spotlight" is all about. 17/

Troubles arise from felt experience. Issues emerge from the political system, broadly defined. Why does this matter? Well, when people's troubles don't connect to what are called the issues, or when issues don't speak to troubles, democracy — and journalism — are working poorly indeed. 16/

The great sociologist C. Wright Mills would distinguish between "troubles" and "issues." My paraphrase: Troubles are the things people are actively worried about in their lives. Mills: “An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened.” 15/

But — and here comes my distinction — if journalists let an ideology distort their reporting so as not to injure a cause they manifestly believe in, then their work has been unduly politicized. Journalism is political. It should not be politicized. 14/ pressthink.org/2020/05/you-...

I absolutely oppose the billionaire tax because I may someday choose to become a billionaire myself

I'm Kat Abughazaleh and I approve this message.

The thing that shocks me most is that all of this incriminating stuff was sitting at the DOJ for 4 years and Biden & Garland were not cynical or ruthless enough to use it against Trump & Musk in the run up to 2024. If only they were the evil ‘weaponizers of government’ that MAGA claimed they were!

Building the wave of the future with an astronomical surge in planet-choking greenhouse gas

ICE has been holding a disabled Black man for a year! Rodney Taylor is a double amputee who was days away from receiving new prosthetic legs when ICE took him. He’s been denied his prosthetics & placed in solitary. His health is declining. Public outrage might save his life. Say his name:

@funkybat.bsky.social wrote .. ‪ "I thought after George Floyd, maybe white folks finally got it. We need to make sure that this lesson gets drilled into everyone’s heads once and for all; that this isn’t just an ICE problem or a political problem, it’s a “culture of law enforcement problem.”

In many aspects--from executions of (alleged) suspects in international waters to executions of (alleged) suspects in the US to a continuing campaign to reduce access to or eliminate access to life saving vaccines--this image illustrates the Nazi death cult that Trump & the GOP have become:

Darren Aronofsky’s the Civil War

WATCH — @repmcgovern.bsky.social : “Republicans have done everything they can to help those who are well off get more, and those who are struggling get less… tax cuts for millionaires & billionaires while their big ugly bill cut $1 TRILLION from Medicaid.”

To avoid the possibility Holocaust remembrance might lead to empathy for migrants, Trump's antisemitism envoy claims Anne Frank "was in Amsterdam legally." In reality, Margot Frank received a summons to go to a labor camp on July 5, 1942. After ignoring this call, they were in Amsterdam illegally.

Ossoff: "This is a seismic event. This should have people across the country absolutely shook. This is a huge deal. This is an FBI raid on the Fulton County Elections office ... This is a shot across the bow at the midterm elections. He tried to steal power when he lost it in 2020."

Do not fall for this garbage. DHS came into my city with an offensive posture, conducted itself as an invader, often attacked residents without any plausible connection to immigration enforcement, violently seized people off the streets. Now it’s our fault people died?

The Democratic Party isn't even a party, it's just a bunch of consultants in a trenchcoat

Not sure how the administration thinks this plays into their narrative, bc at best it shows that Pretti is a normal human being instead of a saint, and at worst it implies they actually targeted and hunted him down like they've threatened to do to other protestors.