#semafors

[thetravellingman87]

[obrozujici-premyslovec]

JAKOŽE HALÓ??

Oni jsou definicí "doufám že to berete umělecky"

[kdo-ze-jsem]

Kamarádi po tom co se dopijou zásoby:

Já, vždy připraven (je to jablečný mošt a jim to nebude připadat vtipné):

Výsledek: musel jsem utéct a zamknout se v koupelně

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ben Smith at Semafor:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio will appoint Darren Beattie, a speechwriter in President Donald Trump’s first term, acting undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, two people briefed on the plans said. Beattie has been a vocal critic of broad swathes of American foreign policy and represents a dramatic step away from the establishment Republicanism Rubio long embodied: In a widely-circulated essay on the site he founded, Revolver, Beattie compared the “color revolutions” that Western democracies backed in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s to “the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.” It’s unclear whether Beattie will be nominated to fill the role on a permanent basis, and he declined to comment on the post. A State Department spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry. Beattie, who has a PhD in political theory from Duke University, where he also taught, was fired in 2018 after attending a conference with white nationalists. He was appointed by Trump in 2020 to a the Commission for the Preservation of American Heritage Abroad, a move that the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, called “outrageous” at the time. (Greenblatt declined to comment Sunday.) The commission works with other governments to preserve sites related to World War II and the Holocaust.

White Nationalist Darren Beattie will be in the State Department, at least temporarily.

See Also:

Wake Up To Politics (Gabe Fleisher): How Trump’s Second Term Has Already Gone Beyond His First

[hynku-vileme-jarmilo]

Polednice - Jiří Suchý, pro vaše potěšení

(Čumblr by o tomto skvostu měl vědět, doufám že ví)

(Textový přepis po přerušení)

U lavice dítě stálo,

z plna hrdla zpívalo

Na tranzistor k tomu hrálo

do rytmu se kývalo.

Hudba kvičí nervy ničí

nepeče se pečeně

Co si syčí na vařiči

matka křičí zděšeně

Mléko prchá!Běda běda!

Nateklo mi do boty

Táta bude bez oběda

Pro tebe ty zlobo,Ty!

Zanech řvaní moje zlato

Hraj si ,tu máš kohouta!

Jedva,matka dořekla to

Bouch bác!Letí do kouta.

Podlily se krví oči

povalené matičce

Pozvedne se,povyskočí

a pak řekne kratičce

Pojď si proň,ty Polednice

pojď vem si ho tuláka

stojí,stojí u lednice

nepracuje,huláká.

Malá,bledá,tváře divé

pod plachetkou osoba

škytá,heká,prská,plive

vichřici se podobá

Vlivem síly odstředivé

plachetka když zvedne se

odhalí se hnáty křivé

Bože,to je recese.

Kde se vzala bledá má

pod plachetkou perzóna

do dnes nevím proč mi dala

dvojitýho nelsona

A pak řekla: naval dítě

nekoukej tak zarytě

na ta slova začla hbitě

honit dítě po bytě

Když pak celá rozechvělá

dítě v rohu lapila

pozval jsem jí,kdyby chtěla

by se se mnou napila

Nejprve se upejpala

pak se vrhla na whisky

Pro mě v domě nenechala

nic než prstů otisky

Od té doby dnes a denně

jak poledne udeří

malá,bledá neprodleně

narve se mi do dveří

Vypije mi slivovici

vypije i petrolej

proto nikdy Polednici

na dítě si nevolej

[uboat53]

Okay, this one's been building for a while. It's going to be long even for my usual standards. Strap in for a really LONG RANT (TM).

INTRODUCTION

Over the last 4 years, the news media has substantially degraded in their ability to do any significant analysis of political events. Maybe it's the drop in viewership after the Trump presidency, but something's off. People calling themselves political journalists are falling for the stupidest nonsense and failing even the most basic understanding of politics.

MY FIRST INKLING

Over the last few decades, I've put together a list of journalists who are consistently interesting and insightful. I look for their pieces when they come out and note when they change publications.

Over the last 4 years, however, nearly all of them have disappeared from major publications. David Weigel left the Washington Post and Jordan Weissman left Slate, both ended up at Semafor. William Saletan left Slate and Charlie Sykes no longer writes for The New York Times, both are now at The Bulwark. Matthew Yglesias left Vox and ended up writing on SlowBoring (although he occasionally also writes for Bloomberg News these days).

What do all of these have in common? All of them left fairly large, well-read publications and ended up at smaller, more niche publications. And they're not alone, a huge amount of competent, capable, and insightful journalists have quietly led an exodus from major publications since the end of the Trump presidency leaving behind journalists who don't seem to be nearly at the same level.

OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS

Take, for example, that we've all known for the last 4 years that Trump was going to run for president again. It wasn't a mystery. So why haven't we seen any coverage of him? Yes, he's not on Twitter anymore, but he still rants and raves on Truth Social. Yes, he's not president anymore, but he still does rallies all the time. Who's covering any of that? Do you know what he's said? Do you know if anything has changed about him since 2020?

Seriously, did you see any coverage of the insane things Trump has said or done over the last four years? Have you seen coverage of the Heritage Foundations Project 2025 plan? It's been four years, has the media actually vetted the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties? I mean, sure, he was president before, but it's been four years. Is there anything new we should know about? I already know a bunch of new things about him, but not because I read about it in major publications of the US news media.

The same lack of knowledge was clear when the media was covering the legislative battles in the first half of Biden's term. You had enough reporters shouting questions at Biden about why he didn't comment more about negotiations on his bipartisan infrastructure bill that he had to remind them all that it was a stupid question. Negotiations rely on trust and the easiest way to destroy that trust is to blab about everything you've discussed. Any reasonably competent journalist would know that, but apparently not the White House Press Corps.

You see the same thing happen again and again and again if you look for it. Coverage of Manchin and Sinema's antics during the legislative battles was nothing more than surface level commentary and did nothing to dig into their tactics and strategies or their goals and objectives. Coverage of Mitch McConnell's freeze-ups basically added no new information after the first hour. Heck, if you even wanted to know what Congressional negotiators were negotiating about in the various bills that they worked on, you'd have to look it up yourself.

TRUMP COVERAGE

What's brought this to a head for me is noticing the coverage of Trump over the last year. I've read tons and tons of detailed and nuanced articles from numerous major publications about his legal travails, but how many have there been about his politics and political fortunes? I'm sure you've read in detail how his New York City trial went, but how many articles have you read about how most of his stories at his rallies devolve into unintelligible nonsense? You've no doubt read about how the Supreme Court granted him a level of immunity from prosecution, but have you read any stories about the likely results of his economic plans?

What you're seeing is an example of how barren the political news landscape has become. Trump's trials are covered by the legal news team, a team that, at most publications and outlets still has a high degree of expertise and experience in their subject, and it shows! The comparison of the legal coverage of Trump to the political coverage of Trump is particularly damning, it's a team at the top of its game standing next to a team that clearly hasn't ever played before.

Tell me, have you seen any analysis of Trump's tax plans? Have you seen anyone discuss the likely effects of his deportation and immigration plans? Has anyone even looked at Project 2025, the plan that a large group of likely Trump staffers have come up with to guide his hoped for second term? And, once you start looking around, you'll realize this isn't even just a Trump problem! What do you know about Biden's proposed policies? Is he proposing any new ones or is he just running on the same things as last time?

THE DEBATE AND POST-DEBATE COVERAGE

Watching the coverage of the 2024 campaign is what really started crystalizing this in my head, but what pushed it over the edge and made me write this all out is the coverage of the debate. Look, we can all agree that Biden had a bad night, but is that literally the only thing a reputable journalist could write about?

Do you know how many falsehoods each candidate uttered that night? How about policies, did they mostly confirm their proposed policies or were there some surprises? We know that Biden seemed confused, but what about Trump? Was he in touch with reality? After all, it's much easier to seem confident and clear in something that you're making up on the spot than something that you have to remember; was he confidently spouting nonsense?

Honestly, the lack of journalistic professionalism didn't start with the coverage after the debate, it was on the stage as well. CNN had two journalists reading the questions, but why? They didn't do any follow-up, they didn't do any fact checking; why did we need journalists on the stage at all? They could have found a random guy off the street or a fourth grader if all they needed the moderater to do was ask questions. Heck, why not advertise your new AI? AI doesn't actually understand what it's reading, but clearly that isn't necessary anyways!

And the post-debate calls for Biden to resign from major outlets have been similarly devoid of actual journalism, resembling celebrity "news" coverage more than they do real investigation. What would it take for Democrats to replace Biden on the ticket? Who would/should be the replacement? If it's not Kamela Harris, what challenges would come up from bypassing the first black woman vice-president for a (likely) white guy? If it is Kamela Harris, what challenges and baggage does she bring to the race? Do any of the proposed candidates do better than Biden in general polling at this point?

If you don't know the answers to any of these questions, that's okay! Apparently real journalists don't even know enough to be asking the questions!

THE CLINTON AFFAIR

Haunting all of this is that the American news media royally screwed up in exactly the same way not that long ago. Eight years ago, the news media descended on the Clinton e-mail story like a pack of rabid piranhas, completely ignoring just about any other story. Every major news outlet (except for those in the right-wing news ecosystem which have no shame at all) has admitted that their coverage of the 2016 election was poor and that they focused on the e-mail story to the exclusion of actually vetting the two candidates, and yet here we are again.

And, for the record, there was literally nothing to the Clinton e-mail scandal. Clinton used a personal e-mail server much as Secretary Powell had done before her with permission from the State Department. Every classified e-mail on her server was found to have come from others inappropriately sending it to her rather than her sending it out. And yet, coverage dominated the 2016 election, driving a drip-drip-drip cycle that damaged Clinton immensely and distracted from any coverage of Trump's very real issues.

Coming out of that election, most news outlets committed to higher journalistic standards. They committed to more aggressive fact-checking, more investigation, and less hysterical coverage of single issues to the detriment of broader coverage, and, during the four years of Trump's term, they largely did that to varying degrees of success. That, more than anything, is what makes their recent decline that much more eggregious. They know how to do this correctly and are actively choosing not to.

WHERE TO FIND GOOD JOURNALISM

And now the answer to the question I've posed obliquely this whole rant: if so much of political journalism is bad, where can I find good journalism?

Honestly, there's not a lot of it out there, but it does exist. NPR, as usual, is a bastion of great journalism. They are sometimes prey to the same instincts that lead the broader media astray, but they've done a great job keeping in place the structures they built as a response to the 2016 election and Trump in general such as active fact-checking and analysis immediately after each interview rather than letting it wait until a lie or piece of misinformation has solidified. PBS is similarly effective in this way; public media, as always, remains pretty much the best large outlet for information in this country.

The Daily Show is also a great source for journalism which is a sad commentary on journalism because, as should be obvious, these people are comedians and not journalists. Still, they do great work, better than most actual journalists because they take seriously the charge to dig deeper for the real story and speak truth to power.

Outside of that, there aren't really any large media outlets that I would strongly recommend. There are, however, smaller news organizations that are doing good work.

Semafor, for example, has a lot of great analysis of politics and actually asks the kinds of questions I noted above and sometimes even finds answers to them. The Bulwark is another one, though it tends to do broader political analysis rather than up-to-the-minute reporting. There are also individual journalists and writers who put forth very insightful analysis in larger publications such as Fred Kaplan at Slate, Joshua Keating at Vox, and Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg, but these are generally the exception to the broader coverage at those outlets. There are also writers at smaller publications like Julia Ioffe who now writes for Puck, though I can't recommend the whole publication.

Honestly, though, it's pretty barren out there. I'd love to have more sources of information that can check each other and make sure I'm not being pulled off into a lane of misinformation, but I'm not finding much out there. Please, if you find any, let me know, I'd love to have more good sources.

SUMMARY/CONCLUSION

The American political news media, which improved significantly as a response to Trump, seems to have lost most of its institutional capacity since his defeat in 2020 to the point where they are now reduced to covering only a single story for days on end without adding any meaningful information or insightful analysis. Even a dedicated news hound like me is left frustrated with the difficulty of finding meaningful coverage and the drumbeat of nonsense is preventing this country from having a real discussion about the real issues in the upcoming presidential election which may be one of the most consequential of our lifetimes.

Don't get me wrong, Biden had a bad debate, but is that really the ONLY THING going on in politics right now? It isn't, but you certainly wouldn't know it from the sheer volume of "think pieces" and "breaking news" articles dominating the headlines these days.

And if it were just that, if it were just this one instance where political journalists were falling down on the job, I would accept it, that kind of thing happens from time to time, but it's not. Time after time on issue after issue for the last four years, political news generally at the nation's largest outlets has shown itself to be incapable of actually covering and analyzing the section of news that it supposedly specializes in with any kind of depth or nuance, instead, descending time and time again into tabloid nonsense.

I know where to find good information, but it takes a lot more digging than I'm used to and people don't follow the news as voraciously as I do shouldn't be expected to do that kind of digging just to have the bare minimum of information necessary to carry out their duties as citizens.

I don't have any solutions here, I just hope that you know that what you're seeing on most TV, radio, and newspapers/online these days is just a shadow of the information you should be getting. Let me know if I'm missing something, because it's getting really depressing.

[larrywilmore]

How the Right fights the culture war in the media

Journalist Dave Weigel gives one of the best explanations of the how the current political split on culture is playing out in the media.

Listen to our full conversation

[bluebirdvanity]

hi, you're cool, beautiful, handsome, seen, and wonderful. you're enough. you're great. hope you have a nice day friend.

[belgradeoldschool]

12.kolo aba lige: partizan - buducnost 90:97 (15.12.2024)

[arthropooda]

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – The campaign to lead Democrats into a second Trump term started here on Thursday, at a meeting of state party chairs who sounded ready to pick one of their own for the national job.

“If the election were in a week, I’d probably win,” said Minnesota DFL chairman Ken Martin, the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees since 2017, presiding over their meeting for the last time. “But the election is in two months.”

Martin was one of four declared candidates to chair the Democratic National Committee, alongside Wisconsin party chair Ben Wikler, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, and New York State Sen. James Skoufis — two men who’d worked inside the party structure for years, and two self-styled outsiders who argued that they could reach new people.

The Biden White House, in its final weeks, was staying neutral. So was outgoing party chair Jaime Harrison, who in his speech to the room of state chairs and vice chairs choked up describing Vice President Harris’s defeat, and predicted a quick Democratic comeback.

“I hope you are ready for a renaissance,” Harrison told the Association of State Democratic Committees on Thursday. “We may have not won the top of the ticket, but y’all kicked some ass down below it.”

[thetravellingman87]

Somewhere @ Torontal.

[diagnozabam]

Rolul semafoarelor în gestionarea traficului rutier și pietonal

Semafoarele reprezintă un element esențial în infrastructura rutieră, având un rol crucial în gestionarea și controlul traficului. Acestea sunt utilizate pentru a asigura siguranța participanților la trafic, atât șoferi, cât și pietoni, și pentru a fluidiza circulația în intersecțiile aglomerate. Principalul rol al semafoarelor este de a coordona fluxul de vehicule și pietoni, reducând riscul de…

[kdo-ze-jsem]

Já říkajíc existenci na hlaváku že klidně lístek na vlak koupím, jestli nutně potřebuje, ale že hotovost nedostane.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ron Filipkowski at MediasPlus:

When I read the interview that Harris Deputy Campaign Manager Rob Flaherty did with Semafor this week where he gave his thoughts on what went wrong with the 2024 election, some key points he made really hit home for me. That is because I said the exact same thing in an article on this platform three days after the election. Democrats are losing the information/messaging war against Republicans for one major reason - MAGA created an alternative media ecosystem that pumps their messaging out to tens of millions of people every single day while Democrats currently have just a handful of small outlets like Meidas to counter them.

The reason why this has happened is quite simple and obvious - the leaders of the Republican Party and MAGA movement spent years establishing, cultivating, financing, promoting, and amplifying alternative media platforms and content, while the leaders of the Democratic Party have largely ignored them as they continue to feed their messaging and dedicate their time to increasingly less relevant legacy media outlets. [...]

He noted that Democrats reliance on traditional media and ads to get their messaging out fails to reach low-information voters who get their information from alternative sources. From the article: [The campaign knew from the beginning that the race was going to come down to voters who do not pay attention to politics or mainstream news and instead get their information from people on YouTube, their friends’ Instagram stories, or links or memes dropped in a group chat.] Flaherty said that there is a reason why this is happening: “Folks are seeking alternative sources of media and are turning away from political news because they don’t trust our institutions. They don’t trust elites, they don’t trust the media, they don’t trust all this stuff. So the party of elites and institutions is going to have a hard time selling to people in these places.”

I have covered the right-wing alternative media ecosystem since 2020. I watched it develop, grow, and become a powerful force in shaping public opinion. It largely happened organically as a result of a wave of right-wingers getting banned from social media platforms over covid content, anti-vaccine messaging, insensitive language on race and gender, election fraud conspiracies, then J6. Millions of right-wingers were deplatformed in 2020-2021, including Donald Trump.

They responded by creating their own platforms by necessity. RSBN, Rumble, Parler, Truth Social, Real America’s Voice, Frank Speech, TPUSA, Just The News, OAN - the list is endless of right-wing alternative media platforms. Then there are the podcasters - thousands of them, some with huge audiences built from nothing. What is the one big reason why the Right has been so successful in building these alternative platforms? The leaders of their party nurture them, promote them, advance them. Donald Trump, JD Vance, Mike Johnson, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson - the list is endless of Republican Party leaders who constantly go on these podcasts. They give print interviews to writers and editors of relatively obscure right-wing platforms that few people have heard of.

But the leaders of the Republican Party go even further than that. Many Democrats have mocked Trump for posting obscure social media accounts who are Q-Anon adherents, or when he post videos or memes from people who aren’t famous or aren’t journalists. It comes across often as weird, strange and at times unhinged. But the point is that he is promoting those accounts, helping them gain followers, helping podcasters gain viewers and advertisers. When Trump or Vance do an interview for a smallish podcast, that podcaster can clip and promote it outside their normal audience. They will gain lots of new subscribers and viewers. Then Trump himself will often post clips from these interviews - which fuels their growth even more. They end up with thousands of new subscribers, new advertisers, and can sell products to help promote their shows. I watched Donald Trump do hundreds of podcast interviews from 2021-2023, most of them were with people you never even heard of. And he wasn’t even running in an election in those years. I watched him amplify thousands of social media posts from small accounts. So, while he was doing it to promote himself, he was simultaneously helping out the people he amplified, thereby helping to build the ecosystem.

[...]

I also saw Trump go on obscure religious podcasts that averaged only a few thousand views. But when he went on they got tens of thousands. He was not only reaching new voters by going to the places where they are, he was promoting those podcasters and helping them build their audiences, which helped him later in 2024 when those people told those larger audiences to vote for him. Then there are the conferences. Almost every weekend, right-wingers are putting on more than one conference in a variety of places around the country where the leading elected officials, media personalities, policy think tankers, and campaign consultants are headliners. But these conferences also invite and even pay influencers and activists to speak and participate. This helps them build a following, and also helps the party identify and promote future stars.

Meanwhile, what have the leaders of the Democratic Party done in this genre? Let’s throw out election years when they are scrambling at the last minute to do some of these things. How many times did Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and other leaders of the party quote-tweet or post something from a smallish Democratic activist social media account in 2023? How many interviews did they do with progressive podcasters with less than 100,000 viewers in that year? How many major conferences headlined by senior members of the Democratic party and media personalities, celebrities, and activists/influencers attended by thousands of people who want to get organized and mobilized to do something were held in 2023? The answer to all of the questions above is - almost none. And that is why we are losing the information war. We have the talent. People are out there talking away into their microphones, writing great columns on independent media, sharing ideas on policy, messaging and strategy. But the leaders of the party are doing virtually nothing to promote them. Is it because they are in their bicoastal urban bubbles, disconnected and out of touch with most of America? Probably. Not completely, but that is certainly an issue.

The only way this gets turned around is for the leaders of the Democratic Party to understand the value in the modern Information Age of a partisan alternative media ecosystem that can promote your program and your message. If the party continues to rely on network news, WaPo, and the NYT, it will continue to shrink, become more elitist, more disconnected from average Americans, and lose more elections. But all it takes is an attitude and strategy change. Get off MSNBC and CNN and start doing some podcasts. If they don’t know where to find them, hire a staffer to find them - because there are plenty out there.

The Democrats are falling behind in the information wars, and that led them to losing the Presidential election.

It is time that Democrats build their own media structure to match the right’s.

[trans-ralsei]

saw the email come up and yelled WHAT