‘Trump’s dark threats.’ CNN’s Brian Stelter: Donald Trump spent the weekend displaying his “autocratic impulses.”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: “There’s no bottom anymore.”
■ The AP on Trump’s rant in Wisconsin Saturday: “Trump shifted from topic to topic so quickly that it was hard to keep track of what he meant.”
■ Ex-New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan surveys mainstream media’s “sanewashing” of Trump: “If you watched the speech, or even snippets of it, you saw … an absolutely ugly and brutal attack on Kamala Harris, full of lies and racist misogyny.”
■ Jeff Tiedrich at Everyone Is Entitled to My Own Opinion: “Trump can’t stop obsessing about Kamala.”
■ Columnist Melissa Ryan: “Trump is trying to talk to women voters. It isn’t going well.”
■ On Sunday, Trump blamed President Biden for his small crowd in Wisconsin.
■ An AP headline, “Trump goes from the dark rhetoric of his campaign to adulation of college football fans,” might instead have been titled “Unable to draw big crowds, Trump goes where one is.”
■ In what reminded some critics of The Purge, he suggested that the nation authorize “one rough hour” of police brutality.
‘CBS made this decision to appease the Trump-Vance campaign.’ Political columnist Brian Beutler condemns the network’s announcement that the moderators of tomorrow night’s vice-presidential debate won’t correct any lies told then.
■ Former White House press secretary and PBS journalist Bill Moyers: The media are flubbing coverage of “congenital liar” Trump.
‘It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy.’ The New York Times dumps on Trump with an editorial endorsing Harris for the presidency.
■ Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis complains even that editorial “is Trump-centric, its praise sideways.” (It mentions “Trump” 22 times, “Harris” only 15.)
■ Stop the Presses columnist Mark Jacob: The Times “is failing our country.”
■ Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich: “The Trump team is now spending almost zero on ads that show him in a positive light. There’s no point, because everyone has already made up their minds about him.”
■ Law professor and former U.S. prosecutor Joyce Vance: Trump’s attacks on special counsel Jack Smith and his attempts to sell watches for up to $100,000 apiece “suggest he is interested mostly in avoiding prosecution and gathering donations.”
■ LateNighter recaps John Oliver’s show last night: “Mitch McConnell (R-One Foot in the Grave) successfully stonewalled so many of Barack Obama’s judicial picks that Donald Trump was essentially handed the keys to the judgeship loony bin.”
‘These very same companies had earlier promised not to remove content for political reasons.’ Journalist Ken Klippenstein, who published a leaked Trump campaign dossier on JD Vance, says it’s been blocked on Twitter X, Google and Meta (Facebook, etc.).
■ Popular Information: Vance appeared at a conference hosted by a preacher who maintains that Harris is a tool of the devil.
■ Twitter acquirer Elon Musk: Trump’s election is “the only way to save” democracy.
■ Michigan State University professors: “Child-free people are primed to play an important role in American politics.”
‘A tiny, tiny victory for the sane.’ Wonkette’s Gary Legum celebrates court rejection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s requests to have his name removed from the ballot in Wisconsin, Michigan and New York.
■ Gasbag Alex Jones’ media empire will be, in columnist Liz Dye’s words, “broken up and sold for scrap.”
■ NewsGuard shines a light on big brands—including “Amazon, AT&T, and Grubhub … helping fund the spread of one of the most pervasive false claims of the 2024 election: That Haitian migrants are stealing and eating pets.”
Post-Helene hell. The hurricane’s path of devastation includes more than 100 dead and communities isolated by the failure of electric and cellular phone networks.
■ The AP explains how it became a “near-perfect storm” …
■ … even as Trump declared climate change “one of the great scams.”
■ More than 90,000 Atlanta-area residents were sheltering in place after a chemical plant fire sent a massive cloud of chlorine-bearing smoke high into the sky.
■ CNN: The storm and its aftermath verified the value of live, over-the-air radio.
■ A Rice University environmental engineering professor: “The clean power shift is too broad for any president to control.”
■ Slow Boring proprietor Matt Yglesias: “Solar is great, but the world needs more.”
Dish racked. DirecTV is acquiring its rival satellite programming provider, Dish Network, and Sling TV.
■ CNN: “Brian Williams is set to anchor election night coverage on Prime Video. Is Amazon getting into live news?”
■ Scripps is killing its streaming and digital news service, laying off more than 200.
Day the music died. Spotify went offline for about an hour yesterday.
■ The Conversation: “Is it bad to listen to music all the time? Here’s how tunes can help or harm.”
■ The Onion offers “Tips For Cutting Back On Streaming Subscriptions”—including: “Stop liking Pixar films. You’re 29 years old.”
‘A form of greatness.’ Non-sports fan Neil Steinberg finds an upside to a record losing season for the White Sox.
■ Paul Sullivan at the Tribune: It leaves the Sox proposal for a new ballpark in the South Loop “dead as the rat hole.”
Thanks. Mike Braden made this edition better.
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