Saturday Report 2/8/25 - Who Will Stand Against the Authoritarians?

The Best of the Rest of the News

— Why every American should care about CBS settling ‘dangerous’ Trump lawsuit, even MAGA. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, wants to merge with Skydance, another media giant, but they need the approval of Trump’s FCC to make it happen. CBS, meanwhile, is being sued by Trump personally for $10 billion for violating “news distortion rules.” The suit is a blatant attempt to intimidate a network into favorable coverage — something straight out of Viktor Orbán’s playbook (or Putin in his early days) — but CBS is, according to insiders quoted in the media, seriously considering making some sort of a settlement, handing millions to Trump to make the suit go away. This follows ABC doing the same thing after George Stephanopolis said that Trump had been found liable for “rape” — a description of Trump’s attack on E. Jean Carroll that the judge in the case said was appropriate — but, again, the network paid him off with $15 million to make the threats go away.

In an extraordinary and risky show of defiance, CNN anchor Jake Tapper took to the airwaves to explain that CBS’s considering a payoff is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do. He said that to “settle the suit would be a white flag of surrender… the network of [veteran broadcaster] Edward R. Murrow… saying, we will not speak truth to power. We will acquiesce to power at the expense of truth.” He wrapped up his rant, saying, “You live long enough and you see how eroded standards that politicians think work for their side always end up being wielded against them. And at that point, it doesn’t even matter who started it. It just matters that corporations are leaning on news divisions to supplicate themselves to whomever is in power because of their bottom line and the implied threat from the government.”

It’s been a few years since I had lunch with Jake in Washington, DC, but I was impressed then and am even more so now. It’s getting more and more dangerous for reporters and opinion writers to speak out against the authoritarian/fascist threat this administration represents. Good on Jake Tapper. Now, the rest of the stars in American media need to get on board rather than cowering behind bland, adjective-free coverage.

— Elon Musk demands firing of ‘disgusting and cruel’ WSJ reporter who uncovered DOGE employee’s racist tweets. Katherine Long is a Wall Street Journal reporter who uncovered (or reported on) the racist social media posts of a 25-year-old Musk staffer who’s invading our government offices. She wrote:

“Marko Elez, a 25-year-old who is part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by the Department of Government Efficiency to scrutinize federal spending, resigned after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

“‘Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,’ the account posted in July, according to the Journal’s review of archived posts.

“‘You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,’ the account wrote on X in September. ‘Normalize Indian hate,’ the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.”

Now, in the administration’s latest attempt to intimidate our nation’s reporters, Musk wants her scalp, retweeting on X a post claiming she’s an USAID employee (she isn’t; that was years ago): “What the hell? Certainly improper, possibly criminal.” When the richest guy in the world and owner of the world’s largest social media site puts a target on your back, it can be extraordinarily intimidating, particularly for somebody who’s never had a high public profile. It’s also dangerous.

And now JD Vance, who’s married to a woman who’s the daughter of Indian immigrants, joined the pile-on against Long, writing on X, “We shouldn’t reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.” He also wants Mr. “Normalize Indian Hate” re-hired, adding: “So I say bring him back. If he’s a bad dude or a terrible member of the team, fire him for that.” It’s gotta be tough cosplaying a white supremacist while married to a dark-skinned Indian woman…

— Trump tries to intimidate The Washington Post and columnist Eugene Robinson. The storied WAPO writer was a guest on Joe Scarborough’s eponymous TV show Friday morning, calling out the Trump/Musk shutdown of USAID, saying:

“These are highly skilled technical people in these NGOs, Christian NGOs, Roman Catholic, and evangelical NGOs, and all of that’s being shut down. The camps are being collapsed in many areas, and people who’ve had their houses burned down, their children raped, who are traumatized. They’re getting food aid from us. The whole operation is going to be shut down. … They don’t care what happens to the people of the world because they don’t vote in the United States. They don’t care that hundreds of millions of people are going to have to be on the edge of starvation if these programs aren’t restored immediately.”

The comments apparently sent Trump into a rage, provoking him to post on his Nazi-infested social media site, “Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post is INCOMPETENT! So sad to see him trying to justify the waste, fraud, and corruption at USAID with his pathetic Radical Left SPIN. He should be fired immediately!!!”

The last president who declared war on our free press was John Adams, and his imprisonment of multiple newspaper publishers for “slandering” him caused his vice president, Thomas Jefferson, to leave the White House and Washington DC for the final two years of the Adams’ presidency; the two men never met in person again (although they resumed a correspondence in the years before their death within hours of each other on July 4, 1826). Jefferson was right; without a free and independent press it’s impossible to have a functioning democracy. Which appears to be exactly why Trump and his fascist-leaning, Nazi-saluting colleagues are so enthusiastic about taking down our media and replacing it with a Greek chorus like Fox “News.”

— Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls out the Court’s rightwingers on presidential immunity. The Democratic-appointee justice made her first public comments since the bizarre decision was handed down months ago, pointing out that our Founders never, ever intended that anybody in America should be above the law and for the Court to say so hurts its credibility. “If we as a court go so much further ahead of people, our legitimacy is going to be questioned,” Sotomayor said in Kentucky this week. “I think the immunity case is one of those situations. I don’t think that Americans have accepted that anyone should be above the law in America. Our equality as people was the foundation of our society and of our Constitution.” Gee, ya think? When FDR and LBJ were pushing through Congress the main components of the New Deal and Great Society, it was Republicans who were screaming about an imperial presidency, saying both presidents had grabbed too much power for themselves. Now we have a man who appears to think himself king of America, and suddenly the GOP is just fine with that.

— GOP bill bans prosecutors from going after officials who refuse to certify elections..say what?! Republican legislators in Arizona are pushing legislation that would let a single crank with a “sworn statement” shut down counting or certifying votes in Blue counties of the state. Currently, it’s illegal for a county clerk or other official to refuse to certify an election without a seriously good reason, but this bill would end “legal liability for balking at certification if they have any ‘documentation or other evidence’ that suggests ‘potential irregularities or errors in the election process,’” including “not just official reports but also sworn affidavits and ‘expert testimony.’” So, if you wanted to shut down the certification of, say, Maricopa County (Phoenix) and only count ballots from the Red regions of the state, all you’d have to do is submit a “sworn affidavit” that you believe there’s something hinky going on. Increasingly, it appears there’s no limit to what Republicans will do to rig elections…

— Trump administration orders states to halt EV charging programs. The bipartisan infrastructure bill that President Biden got through Congress appropriated $5 billion for the construction of EV chargers on federal highways and $2.5 billion for chargers in towns and communities. Yesterday, Trump signed an executive order cancelling those funds and shutting down the program, handing a huge and profitable win to the guy whose company owns the largest EV charging network in American: Elon Musk. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how corrupt this deal is…