Month: June 2018

Propaganda: The Real Source of Trump’s Power

Buck Banks

“Conservative media could take its cues from the party’s congressional leadership, but its most influential figures have personal ties to the president. As Gabriel Sherman has reported, Trump communicates so frequently with Fox News he is serving in some sense as its de facto editorial director. To the extent Trump deserves credit for his takeover of the party, it is through his canny playing of the inside media game, wooing powerful insiders in the right-wing media to make him (rather than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell) the protagonist of their drama.”

— Jonathan Chait

Parents of Korean War Veterans Have Notably Longer Life Spans

Trish

101 to 110

Average age of the parents of Korean War veterans, who Trump claimed repeatedly came up to him on the 2016 campaign trail, begging him to bring home their sons’ remains. According to Esquire’s Jack Holmes, “…this is a quintessential Trumpian lie: totally shameless, easily verifiable as false, and rooted in the notion that “many people”—who are never defined further, and who you’ll never be able to find—are telling the president something that he just happens to agree with himself. How many times in this troubled period in our nation’s history have we heard how ‘many people are saying’ something about Donald Trump?”

Trump’s Decision to Leave the Iran Deal is Making Gas Prices Rise

Trish

The $.40 per gallon jump in gas prices over the past three months can be credited to one person, according to U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ).

“Thanks Trump!” Pallone says.

Senior energy analyst: “A lot of the reason for higher prices is the president’s policy on Iran…You’re going to see prices spike.”

The ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce committee traces a line that leads not straight, but up — as in the price of gas — to Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of a plan to help monitor Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The so-called “Iran deal” also eased previous sanctions in order to encourage Iran to be a world partner.

Pallone is not the only one to make the connection.
[…]