Today In Trumplandia: Darryl Issa On A Roof!

al about that.

Issa apparently, at least according to Think Progress, didn’t want to talk to his constituents, so he took pictures of them from a roof instead.

It’s all rather absurd and creepy and very much the world we live in today. What’s even more surreal is Issa eventually did come down to talk to the crowd and gave an entirely different spin on things.

According to Think Progress:

But the congressman portrayed the encounter as far more amicable, tweeting that he “spent the morning talking to constituents.”

From Think Progress

Engage, Don’t Rage: Kathy Griffin, UR Doin It Wrong

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Oh boy. Kathy Griffin what were you thinking. I have made it clear that I believe that the time for raging against Donald Trump is over. We need to dry our tears and get down to business. If you have a talent, use it, don’t just be outraged and thrash around in anger.

So, what does Kathy Griffin do? Does she tear into Donald Trump with a great comedy special? Write a great movie or TV show for the Trumplandia Age? No. What does she do? She takes a picture of herself with what appears to be a decapitated Donald Trump.

Not cool, lady.
serves to confirm the worse assumptions of Right wing nutjobs when it comes to evil liberals and it doesn’t do anything to improve engagement between The Resistance and Trumplandia.

So, I don’t know. It will be interesting to see what happens to her career after this. Either she goes down in a ball of flames, or not even this can get her out of the murky z-list celebrity zone she seems to reside in. I just hope we can put this behind us.

From The Editor: A Call For Writers

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

About once a year, I start a new blog and have all these grand visions of how I’m going to make it a success and then within about a month I get tired of it and that’s, that. So, with that in mind, let me do it again.

I can’t pay, so no one is going to listen to me, but should someone actually be interesting, I do have a lot of publishing experience and I promise you’ll have a good time. I’m looking for someone, anyone, to help me build this Website into a site that would kind of be the anti-Axios.

Axios does access journalism with the Trump Administration and my vision for this site is it would be like the old Gawker. It would be snarky and fun and analyze the minutia of the Trump Administration in a compelling manner.

But, like I said, I can’t pay. So I don’t expect anyone to take me up on this offer. I just thought I’d ask, regardless, just to see if there was a chance, however small, that someone might take me up on the offer.

You can reach me at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Tsar-A-Largo: Trump Is A Quisling

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

When people are openly talking about the leader of the free world maybe being a Russian agent, we got a problem. But that’s pretty much what one of my favorite writers, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, is suggesting this piece at the magazine’s website.

What Chait can’t quite figure out, though, is if Trump is a willful participant in treason, or if he’s just so stupid and easily influenced by flattery that it just seems that way.

The latest huge amount of smoke in this growing scandal, which I refer to as Tsar-a-Largo, is the weird backchannel that Trump’s ever-silent son-in-law Jared Kushner wants to setup with the Russians during the transition. It’s all very weird.

The whole thing is murky and there are no easy answers. It is chilling, however, that Trump is pretty much doing exactly what you would think a quisling would do in this situation: he’s trying to destroy the post WWII liberal order that has kept us from all dying in WWIII.

But now we’re having to brace ourselves for some extraordinary times. Some pretty weird things are going to happen in the coming days and there are no easy answers, in large part because the Vichy Republicans simply refuse to do their Constitutional duty and be a check and balance on the presidency.

It’s just not going to happen anytime soon. We’re all very screwed, it seems.

From The Publisher: Thanks, Twitter, For Screwing Me Over

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Now, the fact that Twitter is making it more difficult for me to market this site by DMing people on Twitter is probably good for the service in general, but it definitely makes my efforts at building this site a lot more difficult.

I have a pretty good vision for this site, but I simply don’t have the resources to do anything with it to the extent that maybe I otherwise would. I just don’t have the money. There is definitely an audience and a market for what I propose with this site, but the strategy I imagined originally — marketing the site to “thought leaders” on Twitter is now moot.

And, again, while it makes a sense for Twitter to impliment this feature, in a way some of the charm of Twitter is gone. It was fun to think that you might, just might, be able to talk to a powerful person in a direct way using Twitter and those days are now, sadly, over.

I guess it was inevitable that this would happen, but that’s life.

A Vision For Saving Newspapers In The Trumplandia Era

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It appears as though if nothing else, Trumplandia has sparked a fierce newspapers battle between The New York Times and The Washington Post. But the long-term survival of the newspaper business continues to be up in the air. While those two newspapers are well financed, the industry as a whole continues to struggle.

I have written at great length about how I would save the newspaper business and for various reasons, I will try to do a quick recap here. Though, I must note that I know no one listens to me and I’m kind of shouting into the void as things stand.

One thing that is clear is the newspaper business is ripe to be disrupted. But, if I was going to disrupt it, I would disrupt it from within. One of the reasons no one has figured out how to disrupt the newspaper business already is it’s a tough nut to crack give its social component.

But let’s talk a little bit about how you might do it.

To me, to disrupt the newspaper business, you need to re-imagine newspapers altogether. Instead of coming at it from a tech angle and hiring a lot of young reporters on the cheap then throwing algorithms at the problem, I would buy a few regional newspapers — they’re pretty cheap n real terms now — and then go from there.

Now, if you had a big chunk of change to play with — say upwards of a $100 million, I buy a company like Tronc which owns The Chicago Tribune and The LA Times and hook the entire chain up to something that aimed to be a Twitter Killer. Because I think given how desperate things are for the newspaper business, only by embracing social media in a full throated manner can newspapers possibly expect to thrive.

What, exactly, would the feature set of this Twitter Killer look like?

I have go into great detail as to what I think it would look like elsewhere — most notably on my Instagram account — but let’s do it again real quick.

First, you’d have Sections. These would be your typical newspapers sections and would help group content produced by your reporters.

Second, you’d have Groups. This is where things get interesting because only verified account holders could make Groups. Groups would be similar to the old Usenet Newsgroup in that they would contain threads, though in this scenario I call them Discussions.

Discussions would allow your reporters to post articles that people could inline edit in the context of a threaded discussion. It wouldn’t have to be a newspaper article, but that would be one option. There would be a robust live chat feature similar to Slack, but for the masses. It would be archive and searchable.

This concept only works if you buy up a bunch of newspapers and give them something akin to a national footprint. That’s why you might also use this concept with Time Inc., given that it is a national brand.

But, regardless, it’s probably too late to impliment this concept for various reasons. Chief among them being VR and AR are where all the money is these days and it’s doubtful you could get the investment needed to pull this off.

I still think, though, that if you did Twitter one better that something pretty cool could happen. Twitter is the center of the national and global debate these days and yet it has a horrible interface and a sharp learning curve in some respects.

Produce a better mousetrap, if you will, and maybe something cool would happen.

This is more of a general talk about issues of the day, but it’s worth a watch.

Trumplandia Has Caused A Global Leadership Vacuum

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It is self-evident that Donald Trump has caused an enormous leadership vacuum globally. For about 70 years, the world has relied upon the United States for moral leadership.

No longer.

Now, there is a mad scramble to find out who is going to fill the void caused by Trump being not only obviously unhinged, but a Russophile and an ardent admirer of autocrats across the planet. The chilling thing is, this has happened in the absence of a major international crisis.

God only knows what might happen should Putin make a major landgrab in Ukraine or the DPRK attack South Korea. And should both things happen at the same time, we’re going to be faced with the very real possibility of something at least marketed at World War III happening.

To put another way, the unprecedented nature of the Trump Administration is now beginning to be not just a domestic crisis, but an international one as well. The election of Trump in conjunction with Brexit means the global liberal order that we’ve come to expect is now unraveling before our very eyes. All of this doesn’t happen in a vacuum, there could be some very real consquences to Trump being completely temperamentally unqualified to be the leader of the free world.

It doesn’t seem possible that Putin would let the opportunity poised by Trump to go unexploited. I feel like we’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop. Trump is simply unable, on a personal level, to engage in the fine art of diplomacy. He is simply too crass to understand theh nuance that is at the core of international diplomacy. It takes a moral core to be able to stand up to a thug like Putin and Trump has made it painfully clear that he would rather slob Putin’s knob on a geopolitical level, rather than stand up to him.

So, it seems almost inevitable that Putin will either attack Ukraine or attack a Baltic nation. It will be a tragedy of the highest order should this happen because the United States has lost its moral compass. And, yet, unless something drastic happens, something is going to happen. Something big.

With the international order in flux, different great powers are jostling to see how things will fall out. Russia is trying to draw smaller nations away from the herd, while nationals like France and Germany are trying to pick up the banner of the liberal order that the United States has so unfortunately dropped as a part of Trumplandia.

So my only conclusion can be that something that we will in hindsight call World War Three, something that is marketed as such by the American press, at least, is now almost inevitable. You can’t have this much instability in the world order without someone, somewhere — probably Russia in Europe and the DPRK in Asia making a major miscalculation.

Or it could go down something like this — Trump’s Administration, in a spasm of self defense attacks the DPRK just as Russia attacks Ukraine. It just makes too much sense that something like that might happen. I really can’t see any other outcome in the near term with things so much up in the air.

And it’s only going to get worse as long as Trump is in charge in the United States. So when a major American city is vaporized by a DPRK nuclear weapon, you can say a little prayer to yourself and whisper, “But her emails…”

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Don’t Rage, Engage: How To Save The American Republic

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

What I’m about to articulate is, at least to me, very important. The fate of the American experiment in republican self-rule depends on it. Donald Trump’s power comes from how divisive he is. He also has the ability to evoke unprecedented rage on the part of huge swaths of the America electorate, while at the same time prompting a devoting among other groups not seen since Hitler.

To all of this, I say: Don’t rage, engage.

What I mean by this is, don’t assume that anyone who disagrees with you is trying to troll you. Or, put another way, even if they are trying to troll you don’t feed the troll. Calmly and politely explain why you disagree with them.

Now, let me admit, that I, personally, still haven’t gotten to this point yet. I used to say I had gone from center of the sun hot to center of the earth hot in my personal rage against Trumplandia. Now, I have cool down even farther to a just a blinding fury that only pops up every once in a while when it seems like I’ve entered some surreal fantasy land where words have no meaning and actions have on consquences.

But you can take the “Don’t rage, engage” motto in other ways, as well. You can take it as a call to political action. We need to realize the stakes before us and we need to become politically engaged in a way we’ve not seen sine at least the Civil Rights movement.

If you think you have it in you to run for office, run for office. Vote, especially in special elections. Maybe start a reading group, or hell, even a Committee of Correspondence if you think things are dire enough. Anything, something to help defend the American Republic from the seemingly ever-expanding cancer that is Trumplandia.

Trumplandia wants us to grow burnt out. It wants us to grow so burnt out in our outrage that we eventually succumb to to the forces of Trumplandia that want us to live in a “managed democracy” whereby we no longer live in a liberal democracy, but rather an illiberal one.

Or put even another way, we have to keep the faith. We have to have hope. We have to act on an individual level. American ideals are at stake and if we don’t collectively do something and do something now some very basic America ideals will wither away.

As an aside, it kind of blows my mind that Trumplandia gets so work up over leaks. You know they totally during Watergate would have been more concerned with who Deep Throat was than what he was leaking.

Regardless, use whatever rage Trumplandia evokes in you to stay energized, to stay engaged and, after enough time has elapsed, maybe even cross the political divide and try to understand what makes Trumplandia tick. It will be tough, I know, but it’s something we have to do.

The fate of the nation rests on it.

What Do The Russians Have On Trump?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Well, well, well, this is interesting. CNN is reporting that U.S. intelligence agencies overheard the Russians saying they had “derogatory” information on Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Time to pull out this age old favorite:

The CNN report says, specifically:

One source described the information as financial in nature and said the discussion centered on whether the Russians had leverage over Trump’s inner circle. The source said the intercepted communications suggested to US intelligence that Russians believed “they had the ability to influence the administration through the derogatory information.”

But the sources, privy to the descriptions of the communications written by US intelligence, cautioned the Russian claims to one another “could have been exaggerated or even made up” as part of a disinformation campaign that the Russians did during the election.

This is yet another instance of where they’re smoke there’s fire. There comes a point when you have to believe that there may be, in fact, something to all of this Russia stuff. The true sad aspect of it all is that candidate Trump did not even try to hide his Russophila. He was quiet clear that he had a thing for Russia and yet the residents of Trumplandia still voted for him.

That, if nothing else, says that the waters of Trumplandia run deep in the American psyche and it is going to take a lot more than any of us possibly imagine to get rid of Trump. He’s just not going anywhere, potentially for eight years.

We’re going to have to start figuring out ways to mitigate the damage Trump can inflict personally on the Republic. Really, the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is, again: Don’t rage, engage. In other words, don’t just get mad.

There is going to come a point when we’re going to have to stop thinking every time someone disagrees with you that they’re trying to troll you. If we can’t get past that fallacy, we’re all completely fucked.

Axios Of Boring: The Big Meh

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have given myself something of a challenge: find something to write about using the Axios webpage as a writing prompt. I have to say, I find myself stumped.

It’s difficult for me to come up with a point of view at all about anything Axios has to say because it’s so dry and there’s just no there, there. At least with the late Gawker.com, there was an occasionally a juice nugget worth writing about.

Reading Axios, I definitely get the sense they’re so willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt that they’re almost complicit. My vision for this site is to be the exact opposite of Axios, but Axios is so dry and I would never read it otherwise to such an extent that it’s difficult to use it even as a whipping dog for fun.

I guess my biggest problem with Axios is they don’t generate any content I couldn’t find somewhere else. They may have scoops generated by “access journalism” on a occasion, but the actual content is kind of white noise in my book.

None of the headlines pop out as all that interesting and they don’t seem all that interested in doing anything weird like talking to interesting people with stories to tell. It comes across as really corporate and, well, meh.

I mean, Sen. John McCain attacked Jared Kushner. So what.

Give me personality profiles. Give me great, interesting headlines that draw you in and make you think. Meh. Just meh.

I will keep monitoring Axios just because it gives me something to write about, but otherwise, meh.