Billionaire cowards- Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shoing do not have the courage of Cassidy Hutchinson

Echo guest opinion published in The New York Times:

Two Billionaires, Two Newspapers, Two Acts of Self-Sabotage

By Nancy Gibbs

Ms. Gibbs runs Harvard University’s media and public policy center and is a former editor in chief of Time magazine.

Cassidy Hutchinson is 27 years old with more courage to stand up to the political monster DonOLDTrump than Jeff Bezos owner of the Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong who owns the Times.

I can think of some compelling reasons that leading independent newspapers should not be in the business of endorsing candidates for president.

Unfortunately, the acts of self-sabotage by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times do not reflect any of them. And so one more bulwark against autocracy erodes.

The owners of both papers took as long as possible to reveal what they had already concluded: For the first time in years — since 2004 for The Los Angeles Times and 1988 for The Post — each would refrain from endorsing a presidential candidate. This inspired Donald Trump’s campaign to whoop that even Vice President Kamala Harris’s “fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job.” The Times’s editorial editor, Mariel Garza, resigned and said the decision made the organization look “craven and hypocritical.” Others followed.

The Post’s endorsement of Ms. Harris had reportedly already been drafted, only to be shelved on the orders of its owner, Amazon’s founder, Mr. Bezos. But it fell to the paper’s publisher, William Lewis, to announce the decision, saying, “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” 

Its editorial editor, David Shipley, in the face of his mutinous editorial board, said he owned the outcome, which he called a way of creating “independent space” for voters to make up their own minds.

I’m not worried that Post and Los Angeles Times readers will have trouble deciding how to vote. I’m worried they’ll have trouble deciding whom to trust.

Both papers are owned by billionaires — Patrick Soon-Shiong at The Times and Mr. Bezos at The Post — and it is this grim similarity that raises alarms, especially in the case of The Post, whose “Democracy dies in darkness” motto now moans like an epitaph. Rightly or wrongly, readers will reasonably conclude The Post backed off an endorsement of Ms. Harris to protect the owner’s business interests. Those interests are vast, spread across commerce, the military and, increasingly, the frothing frontiers of artificial intelligence. How now can readers trust The Post’s often excellent news coverage of those topics, which are core to its mission? It did not help the paper’s credibility when, on the day the nonendorsement was announced, Trump was spotted greeting executives of Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin space company in Austin, Texas.

The Post’s gutsy former editor Marty Baron was unsparing: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” he posted on X. “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Forswearing the ritual of presidential endorsements might be defensible, even admirable, if the decision had unfolded differently and about three years earlier. Newspaper endorsements are seldom influential and are frequently confusing. They are traditionally the prerogative of the publisher or owner and are concocted by an editorial board that typically exists in an independent, parallel universe from the newsroom. Few outside the industry know this, and most readers naturally take endorsements as an expression of partisan support from the whole institution, not merely an antiseptically isolated outpost. (The New York Times stopped making endorsements in local races but continues to do so for the presidential contest.)

Democracies need citizens to trust in their institutions, (👍yes❗) and the press is chief among them. 

When you ask people why they have been losing trust in the media, they frequently refer to the bias and agendas they see in the coverage, and it’s easy to see how endorsements make this problem worse. In our age of media saturation, there is no shortage of commentary about candidates — adversarial, analytical, scholarly and scrappy, including from the varsity columnists at these news outlets — so voters will hardly be marooned if faceless editorial boards don’t also weigh in. When I was the editor at Time magazine, we did not have an independent editorial board; our readers got enough peppery punditry from our opinion writers. It’s possible that fewer institutional endorsements would be a valuable step toward restoring trust in the fairness and public purpose of our
leading news organizations.

That’s not what we are watching here. Neither paper has developed a sudden allergy to endorsements; The Post backed the Maryland Democratic Senate candidate Angela Alsobrooks weeks ago, as The Los Angeles Times did for the California Democrat Adam Schiff. And the arguments against endorsing have been circulating for years. Announcing a sudden change in policy so close to the election suggests cowardice more than conviction, however much airbrushing the apologists do.

I have immense respect and sympathy for journalists at news organizations, which are increasingly embattled just when we need them most. The business model is dissolving, social media platforms are piranhas, the competition for attention is relentless, and the stakes could not be higher. Billionaires like Mr. Bezos have pumped millions of dollars into newsrooms so that reporters can do the essential work of telling us what’s happening. This is no time to abandon them. They deserve better than this, and so do the rest of us.

Republicans somehow wrongly believe that shutting down government will support election integrity

AOL.com reports:  "With just over six weeks until Election Day, the poll finds Vice-President Kamala Harris with a 5-point lead over former President Donald Trump among registered voters, 49% to 44%. While that result is within the margin of error, it’s a clear shift from July’s poll, when Trump was ahead by 2 points before President Joe Biden’s exit."

Echo opinion published in The Washingon Post by the Editorial Board:

Threatening a shutdown, Trump reminds voters what his first term was really like:  Republicans threaten to hold up funding the government unless Congress makes voting harder.

OMG! The country is again hurtling toward a government shutdown on Oct. 1 and, instead of helping, former president Donald Trump is showing voters he intends to govern in a second term much like he did in his first — chaotically.

At issue is whether Republicans should make the passage of a restrictive voting measure a condition for funding the government. “I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don’t get it,” Mr. Trump said on a podcast two weeks ago. “It should be in the bill, and if it’s not in the bill, you want to close it up.”

But, 😡😩House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) plans to do just that. So,  he intends to hold a vote on a funding bill that includes the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which is supposed to crack down on illegal voting in national elections, despite scant evidence that this is a problem. 

Noncitizen voting is already a serious crime — punishable by prison, removal from the United States and a permanent bar on admission to the country. The legislation would require documentary proof of citizenship for people to register and cast ballots, including mail-in voting. This would add a barrier to electoral participation that would probably result in many legitimate voters being deterred and legitimate votes not being counted.

The act, which already passed the Republican-controlled House as stand-alone legislation a few months ago, would require states to purge their voter rolls and even let individuals sue election officials who register voters without first checking their documents.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1996 already requires states to use a common voter registration form, which includes attesting, under penalty of perjury, that the applicant is a U.S. citizen. Violators can and should be prosecuted.

Given the penalties, it’s not surprising that noncitizen voting in federal elections is rare. The Heritage Foundation has spread deceptive videos that suggest rampant illegal voting by noncitizens in swing states such as Georgia, but the think tank’s own database shows just 23 documented instances of noncitizens voting in federal elections from 2003 to 2023 across the entire country. (We have consistently opposed noncitizens voting in municipal elections, including the District of Columbia, but national legislation concerning federal voting would not stop that.)

Without any evidence, Mr. Johnson claimed this spring that “we all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections, but it’s not been something that is easily provable.” After winning in 2016, Mr. Trump claimed that 3 million to 5 million illegal votes were cast in states such as California, denying him a popular vote victory. (He could never answer: Why wouldn’t these illegal votes have been cast in the battleground states that decided the election?) A commission Trump appointed in 2017, failed to discover any proof before disbanding. Gut feelings — particularly ones that line up with political interests — do not substitute for evidence.

Governance-minded Republicans recognize the strategic folly of  Johnson and Trump’s brinkmanship. Staffers for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have warned privately that forcing a showdown on voting in a government funding debate could open the door for Democrats to tack on their own voting-related legislation. Another twist is that Republicans under Trump might wind up discouraging Americans who would have voted for the GOP.

Republicans’ preoccupation with clamping down on voting access stems from a time when they benefited from suppressing the vote, particularly among minority voters. For their part, Democratic leaders favor passing federal legislation, such as the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Act, that would increase voting access.

Yet spending much time sorting out who would gain politically from this or that voting bill risks missing the principles at stake. Regardless of who would net votes, making it harder to cast ballots is wrong absent some urgent threat to voting integrity. To the extent there is such a threat, it is on the part of politicians who sow doubt about the nation’s electoral system — and propose new rules that would burden millions of Americans.

Trump got out-debated; so it’s somehow ABC’s fault? We need to be better !

Echo opinion published in the Kanasa City Star newspaper by Dion Lefler:  In the wake of Trump’s disastrous showing in Tuesday night’s debate with Vice-President Kamala Harris, attacking the moderators, ABC News and reputable journalists everywhere has been the best response that MAGA can muster up. Believe me, we’re used to it. The sad part is that some people still believe it. 

My Facebook feed has been peppered with posts and comments about an alleged “ABC whistleblower” about to anonymously release an “affidavit” that claims the network leaked the questions to Kamala Harris.

As far as I can tell, it originated with a MAGA account on X (where else?) by an anonymous user with the handle @DocNetyoutube, who bills himself as a “Black Insurrectionist”: “I will be releasing an affidavit from an ABC whistleblower regarding the debate. I have just signed a non-disclosure agreement with the attorney of the whistleblower. The affidavit states how the Harris campaign was given sample question which were essentially the same questions that were given during the debate and separate assurances of fact checking Donald Trump and that she would NOT be fact checked. Accordingly, the affidavit states several other factors that were built into the debate to give Kamala a significant advantage.

I have seen and read the (fake ❗)affidavit and after the attorney blacks out the name of the whistleblower and other information that could dox the whistleblower, I will release the full affidavit. I will be releasing the affidavit before the weekend is out.” 

OMG❗ 😕😠 I couldn’t even count the red flags (danger❗ 🔺 ⚠️) in that paragraph. 

Nevertheless, it’s been amplified throughout the right-wing echo chamber. As I scrolled through references to this supposed whistleblower in my X account, I ran out of patience before I ran out of posts.

But it was Trump who fanned the rumor in the first place: “I watched her talk, and I said, ‘You know, she seems awfully familiar with the questions,’” he told (fake❗ ) Fox News shortly after the debate. 

So there you have the formula. Trump makes an off-the-cuff, unsubstantiated remark, an anonymous nobody expands on it claiming he has the “proof,” and partisan media and individuals, desperate to believe their hero couldn’t possibly just have been out-debated, pick it up and run with it. 

Some cite 2016, when then-candidate Hillary Clinton actually was fed some debate questions by Democratic Party strategist Donna Brazile, who was also a CNN commentator.

Brazile was subsequently forced to resign from the network and it was a stain of dishonor on CNN’s journalistic ethics. Everybody in the news business is aware of it, nobody wants to go there again, and ABC vehemently denies it did. 

Not that anyone needed the questions in advance of Tuesday’s debate. Indeed, the questions were as predictable as sunrise. 🌅

Harris prepped, Trump didn’t, and it was obvious to anyone other than the most MAGA of partisans.

And it only got worse afterward. Incensed by moderators fact-checking his wilder claims during the debate, 

Trump went on (fake❗) Fox News and threatened ABC: “To be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.” That’s neither honest nor factual. ABC News doesn’t have a license. In America, no news organization has or is required to have a license. It’s illegal under the First Amendment.

Sunday September 15, is the International Day of Democracy. Since it started in 2008, it’s been a time to reflect on the gifts of self-governance, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Misinformation and disinformation is an existential threat to all those things. These are unprecedented, trying, and frankly disturbing times for democracy, when anyone can make up whatever they want, post it online and have it shared and accepted as gospel by a significant percentage of the population.

We don’t need less fact-checking in our political system. We need exponentially more of it. 

An ill-informed democracy is not a democracy at all, it’s just mob rule. This Democracy Day, and every day, we need to look things up, find things out, and never shy away from denouncing the untruths we now encounter on a daily basis in our everyday lives. If we don’t, the American experiment dies of our neglect. 

Rather, we need to remind ourselves that facts do matter. We owe that to the honor of our ancestors, many of whom fought for democracy. And we owe it to our children, may they never have to.

Republicans are responsible for America's gun violence epidemic- outlaw AR15 automatic weapons

Not One More❗ After another deadly school shooting, this time in Georgia, gun reform makes a campaign comeback: Immigration and the economy have dominated the presidential race. But gun violence is now back on the ballot. 

Echo opinion by Renée Graham published in the Boston Globe:

At a campaign rally in New Hampshire, Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled to talk about her economic plan for small businesses. But taking the stage hours after a shooting at a suburban Georgia high school, she briefly went off script to address the first mass shooting of this still-nascent school year.

Calling the shooting by an alleged 14-year-old gunman that killed two fellow students and two teachers “a senseless tragedy,” Harris said, “we’ve got to stop it, and we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. You know it doesn’t have to be this way.”

It doesn’t — except that in a nation with more guns than people, it’s too often “this way.” In this presidential race, gun violence has not been as prominent a topic as the economy or immigration. But the tragedy in Georgia should put gun violence back on the ballot.

At a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris was scheduled to talk about her economic plan for small businesses. But taking the stage hours after a shooting at a suburban Georgia high school, she briefly went off script to address the first mass shooting of this still-nascent school year.

Calling the shooting by an alleged 14-year-old gunman that killed two fellow students and two teachers “a senseless tragedy,” Harris said, “we’ve got to stop it, and we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. You know it doesn’t have to be this way.”

It doesn’t — except that in a nation with more guns than people, it’s too often “this way.” In this presidential race, gun violence has not been as prominent a topic as the economy or immigration. But the tragedy in Georgia should put gun violence back on the ballot.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, the shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., marks the 385th time this year that four or more people were killed or injured in a mass shooting. Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14-year-old students, and math teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39; and Christina Irimie, 53, died. Nine others were injured.Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, both 14-year-old students, and math teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39; and Christina Irimie, 53, died. Nine others were injured.

These casualties, as well as the “AR-15 style” rifle that authorities say was used by the alleged shooter, have reignited conversations about gun reform that had been largely sidelined throughout this election season.

After a man was killed and another wounded during an assassination attempt against Donald Trump in July, conversations about guns were muted, at best. And even when that shooter’s weapon was revealed to be an AR-15 style rifle, it was President Biden and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, an ardent gun reform proponent — not Trump or the GOP — who brought up banning assault weapons.

Meanwhile, Republicans point fingers of blame in every direction except at the easy availability of weapons designed solely to kill and injure a lot of people in a very short amount of time.

In her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, Harris mentioned “the freedom to live safe from gun violence in our schools, communities and places of worship,” as a “fundamental” right. 

In Trump’s Republican National Convention speech in July, Trump talked about crime and criminals only to (😡wrongly❗) vilify migrants. He used the word “gun” only once — to hail Hulk Hogan,

 the former wrestler who endorsed the former president, as “one strong son of a gun.”

After the Georgia shooting, Trump posted a response on his social media site. Again, he said nothing about guns but called the alleged shooter “a sick and deranged monster.” 

But in an appearance before the National Rifle Association in May, Trump had plenty to say about firearms, including the false and inciting claim that “if the Biden regime gets four more years, they are coming for your guns.” He said that Biden “has a 40-year record of trying to rip firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens.”

In 1994, Biden, then a senator, helped pass a ban on assault weapons. It prohibited the manufacture or sale of certain semiautomatic weapons to civilians and banned high-capacity magazines of 10 rounds or more. The ban expired in 2004.

After mass shootings, Republicans often say that the tragedy should not be politicized, a cynical attempt to quell public debate. This time they’ve avoided saying even that. With the first presidential debate days away, they seem reluctant to say anything that can be held against Trump or highlight GOP objections to gun reform.

That’s why Harris should keep gun violence on her political agenda. She can tout the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 2022, signed into law weeks after mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas. It was the first major gun reform bill passed in nearly 30 years.

Harris can do what Trump will not — say explicitly that weapons of war have no business on America’s streets; that most domestic violence fatalities are caused by guns; that everyday gun violence is a preventable epidemic; and that in order to strengthen gun reform, Democrats must regain control of the House and hold onto the Senate.

With Georgia on the nation’s mind, Harris can make the case that while Republicans have branded the issue of gun reform as partisan, the guns that destroy American lives and communities are not.

Renée Graham is a Boston Globe columnist.

Pushing back on revisionism: Teaching American racial history in the nation's National Parks

Echo report by Ariana Figueroa published in the Georgia Recorder newspaper:

WASHINGTON, DC — On what would have been the 82nd birthday of Emmett Till (born on July 25, 1941 in Chicago, Ill.), a Black boy kidnapped and murdered by two white men in Mississippi (died August 28, 1955, in Drew, MS), President Joe Biden on Tuesday designated a new national monument at sites connected to the lynching that became a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

The Emmett Till historical marker outside the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Emmett Till’s murderers were tried by an all-white jury and acquitted. (Photo courtesy National Parks Conservation Association)

“Telling the truth and the full history of our nation is important,” Biden said. “For only with truth comes healing, justice, repair, and another step forward toward forming a more perfect union. We’ve got a hell of a long way to go.”

The proclamation establishes 5.7 acres for the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument across three separate sites. Before signing it, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took aim at states dominated by Republican state legislatures that have passed laws banning the teaching of certain lessons related to race and diversity, as well as conservative campaigns to ban books about Black history in public schools and libraries.

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, the site of Emmett Till’s murder trial. © Alan Spears/NPCA. The courthouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2007 for its role in the Till story and its Richardsonian Romanesque architecture. That same year, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission issued a public apology on behalf of the residents of Tallahatchie County to the Till family.

Vice-President Harris called out Florida, where the State Board of Education rewrote African American history standards to conclude that Black people benefited from slavery because they learned skills.

“Today there are those in our nation who would prefer to erase or even rewrite the ugly parts of our past, those who attempt to teach that enslaved people benefited from slavery, those who insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, who tried to divide our nation with unnecessary debates,” she said. “Let us not be seduced into believing that somehow we will be better if we forget. We will be better if we remember.”

Harris visited Jacksonville, Florida, last week, where she slammed the new guidelines and told a crowd that Florida’s book bans, LGBTQ+ rights restrictions and Black history revisions are part of a coordinated national right-wing agenda.

Since 2021, thousands of books have been banned and removed from library shelves and classrooms after campaigns by conservative activists, particularly by Moms for Liberty. The White House named a book banning coordinator in response.

“At a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history, we’re making (it) clear, crystal, crystal, clear how darkness and denialism can hide much, (but) they erase nothing,” Biden said. “We can’t just choose to learn what we want to know, we have to learn what we should know … the good, the bad, the truth of who we are as a nation.”

Three sites:

Biden, who was 12 at the time Till was murdered in 1955, at the age of 14, said the three sites not only tell the story of Till, but his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who was an educator and activist. She died in 2003.

One of the sites is at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in the historic Black neighborhood of Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side, where Till-Mobley demanded an open casket funeral to show how her son was brutalized.

The images of his unrecognizable face ran in newspapers and magazines, and his lynching became a driving force for the civil rights movement. Biden also commended the Black press for its work in reporting and deeply covering Till’s murder.

The other two sites are in Mississippi, one in Graball Landing, outside of Glendora on the banks of the Tallahatchie River, where it’s believed that Till’s body was found. The other site is the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, where the trials for the men accused of his murder were held.

Till was lynched after a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, accused him of whistling at her and she told her husband, Roy Bryant, about it.

The two white men accused of his murder and torture, Roy Bryant and his brother J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury.

In 2008, the community of Graball Landing established a sign, known as the Emmett Till memorial, to mark where it’s believed his body was found, but the sign has been replaced several times due to people vandalizing the sign and even shooting at it. The sign is now bulletproof, made of steel and weighs 500 pounds.

The National Park Service will manage the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument.

The state where two sites will be dedicated to Till in 2022, passed a law banning the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 education, reported Mississippi Today. CRT is a theoretical method in higher academic settings that is used to explore how the legal system can be used in perpetuating and remedying inequality.

Telling the story:

The national monument is an opportunity to tell the story of Emmett Till, said Eboni Preston Goddard, the Southeast Region Associate Director for the National Parks Conservation Association, which advocates for the protection of national monuments.

“It’s not about necessarily who killed Emmett Till, but what killed Emmett Till,” she said in an interview with States Newsroom.

Preston Goddard said it’s important to understand the inequity, injustice and racism that led to Till’s murder.

“Maybe today will be a new day for us to have these deeper conversations, for people to see just how hard and rough and difficult things like this have been as it’s impacted communities for generations,” she said, adding that her grandmother is 90 and “this is in her lifetime.”

Preston Goddard said it’s also important that Till’s mother is honored for her determination to have an open casket. The decision to show her son’s body was in defiance of Mississippi officials, who wanted Till quickly buried in Mississippi.

The president said Tuesday’s announcement is part of the Biden administration’s commitment to racial justice.

Last year (2022), Biden signed into law a bill to make lynching a federal crime, and named the bill in Till’s honor.

There have been more than 200 attempts to make lynching a federal hate crime, with the first effort starting in 1900, by U.S. Rep. George Henry White, a North Carolina Republican. More than 6,500 Black Americans were lynched between 1865 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, which has tracked racial violence since the Civil War.

The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument is Biden’s fourth national monument designation. The other three are the Castner Range National Monument in Texas, Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada and Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument in Colorado.

A national monument can either be established by Congress or the president through the Antiquities Act of 1906.

The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will also be near another national monument, the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi, which honors the life and work of husband and wife civil rights activists.

Medgar Evers established an NAACP office in Jackson, Mississippi, and worked to integrate the University of Mississippi in 1962, before he was assassinated outside his home.