Citizen Cartwright

Pete Hegseth’s hearing, and the pressure campaign to get him confirmed

Republicans “warmed” to the combat veteran and former Fox News host at his Tuesday confirmation hearing for Defense secretary, Roll Call says.

 

“Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss. “The nominee is unconventional, just like that New York developer who rode down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president. That may be what makes Mr. Hegseth an excellent choice.” 

 

Ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the totality of allegations against Hegseth, including excessive drinking, sexual assault and financial mismanagement of organizations he led, along with Hegseth’s own previous statements about the military, disqualified him from the job. 

Hegseth skirted specific allegations about his personal conduct, saying he’d been the victim of false allegations by anonymous sources, circulated by media organizations he said were determined to destroy him, reports The New York Times.

“I’m not a perfect person, but redemption is real.” he said. “I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully I’m redeemed by my lord and savior Jesus.”

He billed himself as a Washington outsider and change agent who, unlike Pentagon chiefs before him, wasn’t beholden to special interests or specific companies. He vowed to return a “warrior ethos” to DOD, root out wokeness and to reinstate, with pay and rank, troops who were discharged for refusing an order to take the coronavirus vaccine.

 

President-elect Trump told Republican senators in meetings last week that Hegseth’s confirmation is a priority for him, turning the process into a loyalty test, says The New Yorker.

The Trump team’s efforts to crush dissent range from public-media campaigns, paid for by billionaires, to targeting vulnerable senators in conservative states, to “more underhanded” tactics aimed at intimidating and discrediting potentially hostile witnesses, The New Yorker says.

Several Republican senators have said they’re waiting for the FBI’s background report on Hegseth to assess the conflicting claims about his behavior.

But according to multiple well-informed sources, the bureau failed to interview several potentially crucial witnesses, The New Yorker reports.

The FBI regards the president who appointed the nominee — in this case, Trump — as “the client” who determines the scope of the inquiry, The New Yorker says.

The FBI’s report on Hegseth may be irrelevant, in any case, because it appears that most senators will never get to see it, says The New Yorker. Wicker, who was briefed on the FBI investigation into Hegseth last Friday, doesn’t plan to share the bureau’s findings with any senator other than Reed, the top-ranking Democrat.

 

Committee member Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who’d been seen as a key Republican skeptic of Hegseth’s nomination, said she’ll support him after his performance at Tuesday’s hearing.

What special council’s report on Trump effort to overturn 2020 election says

Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Trump on charges of illegally seeking to hold on to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial, if his 2024 election victory hadn't made it impossible for the prosecution to continue.

“The department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Smith wrote.

“Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” he wrote.

Trump was indicted in August 2023 on charges of working to overturn the election, but the case was delayed by appeals and ultimately significantly narrowed by the conservative-majority Supreme Court, which held for the first time that former presidents have sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, The Associated Press notes. 

The Justice Department delivered the 137-page volume — half of Smith’s overall final report— to Congress just after midnight on Tuesday, says The New York Times.

The release of this volume of the report came less than a day after Judge Aileen Cannon, who oversaw Trump’s other federal case — about classified documents — issued a ruling allowing it to be made public.

She, also prohibited the Justice Department from immediately releasing — even to Congress — the second volume of Smith’s report, which is about the documents case. Cannon has scheduled a hearing for Friday in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., to discuss how to handle that volume.

In a social media post shortly before 2 a.m. Tuesday, Trump said, “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”

Here is the text of the report.

Dan Balz: GOP shutdown showdown showed boundaries of Trump’s power

The events leading up to Friday’s late-night passage of a spending bill showed the “perils” of governing that President-elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are likely to face in the year ahead, even as they have control of all the branches of government, says Washington Post analyst Dan Balz.

 

“The drama of the past week highlighted problems for various players. For Trump, this was recognition that as much power as he has, there are limits to what governing-by-Truth-Social can accomplish in a legislative environment. No wonder Trump prefers executive action and recess appointments to the gritty business of holding his own party together,” Balz says.

 

“Trump can dictate and he can threaten, as he has been doing. His allies can warn Republican lawmakers in the House or the Senate that if they don’t toe the line, they will face primary challenges. But when 38 House Republicans reject his entreaties, as they did at one point in the negotiations over the legislation to keep the government open, that’s evidence that his power has boundaries.”

 

“Whether it’s levels of government spending or nominations for his Cabinet and other positions that require Senate confirmation, Trump and his party may control both chambers in the coming year but not with such commanding majorities that he can have his way willy nilly.

 

“Will this past week’s drama, for example, remind Republicans in the Senate that they represent a separate branch of government and therefore have the power to block a few of Trump’s most controversial nominees, even at the risk of displeasing him?”

 

“The newest player in all this was Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and seeming a confidant of Trump who is using his association with the president-elect to the fullest. Musk helped kill the first bipartisan spending package with posts on his X social media platform, some with inaccurate claims about the legislation, that helped sink what Johnson thought was a carefully crafted agreement.

 

“Musk seems to enjoy flexing his muscles in the political arena, but with no experience in the legislative process.”

 

“Musk’s initial claims about how much can be cut from government were extravagant and likely unachievable, unless he and Ramaswamy recommend taking an ax to federal entitlement programs [such as Social Security and Medicare] and the defense budget.

“His first foray into dealing in real terms with the budget underscored that he remains a novice in this arena. As smart and entrepreneurial as he has been in developing electric vehicles or sending rockets into space, the business of government doesn’t conform to the business of business.”

Hope

Researchers, nonprofit leaders and other experts shared what keeps them optimistic about a better future for American society in an article published after the election by The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California at Berkeley.

 

The article isn’t password protected, so I won't try to summarize it for you.

The Trump-Musk blow-up of bill to prevent government shutdown

I don’t want to spend your time or mine on this, so let’s make it as quick as possible. 

 

This is how Roll Call describes it:

 

"President-elect Donald Trump lobbed a grenade into Speaker Mike Johnson’s carefully negotiated, catchall legislative package late Wednesday, urging Republicans to scrap the massive stopgap funding measure in favor of a stripped-down version with aid to farmers and natural disaster victims.

"There’s another new wrinkle: Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance said they want a debt ceiling boost added to the bill, rather than have to deal with it on their watch in mid-2025 when the Treasury Department is expected to again run out of borrowing authority."

 

The Associated Press says:

 

"Trump’s joint statement with Vice President-elect JD Vance, which stopped the bill in its tracks, punctuated a daylong torrent of social media posts by Musk attacking the legislation for what he described as excessive spending.

 
"'Stop the steal of your tax dollars!' Musk wrote on his social media platform X as he dangled primary challenges against anyone who voted for the budget deal, a threat Trump later echoed in a post of his own."

 

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a veteran of Washington’s budget fights "suggested that the owner of a space rocket company wasn’t the right person to spearhead a congressional spending debate," says AP.

 

“He doesn’t know politics like he knows physics," Norquist said.

ABC News succumbed to Trump’s pressure; will others?

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

There’s a theme emerging in some of the news recently. It began just before the election, when owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times both killed plans by their editorial boards to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to be president.

 

Since Donald Trump was elected, more stories have followed the same theme:

— Several tech CEOs have made $1 million contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee.

— Tech leaders also have made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago

— And the tech bro who got there first with the most, Elon Musk, may already be seeing return on his investment: According to Reuters, the Trump transition team plans to kill a regulation requiring the reporting of accidents involving self-driving vehicles — most of which involve cars by Musk’s Tesla.

— This follows Trump’s announced plan to nominate Jared Isaacman, a tech billionaire with close ties to Musk and SpaceX, to head NASA.

 

Of course, where there are carrots, there are sticks: The Senate had a press protection bill pending that had passed the House with bipartisan support; it would have barred the federal government from compelling reporters to reveal confidential information, such as sources. Trump announced his opposition, and Senate Republicans blocked floor action.

 

Most notable of all was the decision by ABC News, revealed last weekend, to settle a libel suit filed by Trump. The decision is striking, given the difficulty facing public figures under U.S. law to win such suits in the absence of particularly egregious behavior.

Historian Timothy Snyder, who has written frequently about authoritarianism, calls it “obeying in advance.”

Margaret Sullivan commented:

“ABC News should never have caved. They might well have prevailed if they had hung in there. The legal bar is very high for libeling a public figure, and Trump is the ultimate public figure. Instead, this outcome encourages Trump in his attacks on the press — and he needs no encouragement.

“As one law professor told the Times, what ABC News did was very unusual,” she said. “News organizations generally don’t settle ‘because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side.’”

“Why did ABC News throw in the towel? It‘s hard to know for sure, but gets easier if you are aware that the news organizations is owned by Disney, a huge corporation with a lot of turf to protect,” Sullivan said. “As the Times reported, the Disney executive who oversees ABC News had dinner with Trump’s top aide, Susan Wiles, just days before the settlement, as ‘part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.’”

“Was this settlement, which includes ABC’s public expressions of regret, a simple case of kissing the ring? It sure looks that way. Trump has sworn to get revenge on his enemies and he values, above all, loyalty and kowtowing.”

Brian Stelter of CNN noted: “The president-elect has a long history of litigation, with numerous unsuccessful cases against news outlets in the past. Some media law experts believed ABC had a good chance of beating him at trial, given the inherent challenge of proving Stephanopoulos acted with ‘actual malice.’ But trials also add uncertainty and a risk of severe reputational damage – factors that ABC’s parent company, Disney, is now avoiding.”

 

Journalist Parker Molloy, writing in Nieman Lab’s predictions for 2025, argued that acquiescence won’t spare journalism organizations: 

“The bitter irony is that this voluntary surrender won’t protect these outlets from Trump’s attacks. He’ll continue using them as punching bags to rally his base, even as they bend over backwards to appear ‘fair’ to his administration. But their owners calculate that performative criticism is preferable to actual accountability journalism that might threaten their bottom lines.

“For those who remember post-9/11 journalism, this feels eerily familiar,” Molloy said. “But at least then, the press could claim they were caught off guard by an unprecedented national crisis. This time, they’re choosing compliance with eyes wide open, trading their watchdog role for a seat at the billionaire’s table.

 

“The question isn’t whether mainstream media will hold Trump accountable in his second term — they’ve already decided not to try. The question is whether enough independent voices can survive to fill the vacuum they’re leaving behind.”

 

Molloy’s prediction for 2025 is coming true early. The New York Times reported over the weekend that Trump and his allies were threatening more lawsuits.

 

In fact, on Monday, Trump sued the Des Moines Register and Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, seeking “accountability for brazen election interference” over a Nov. 2 poll that showed Kamala Harris up by 3 percentage points in Iowa.

 

According to Semafor, “news organizations are bracing” for more attacks:

“In an email shared with Semafor, Axios’ senior counsel told staff that the news organization anticipates the new administration will attempt to force reporters to out their sources, will ramp up lawsuits against news organizations for defamation, and could charge journalists with crimes using the Espionage Act,” Max Tani wrote.

One analysis suggests that voters elected Trump due in part to their revulsion at the “elites” — a category that, for many, includes legacy media. Trump and his billionaire allies — populists, apparently — are seizing that opportunity, wielding their wealth to intimidate and isolate news organizations. ABC News acquiesced, essentially waiving the protection of the First Amendment.

The near-universal dismay within the industry at ABC News’ decision may be mere bravado. Or it may indicate not every media enterprise will be so compliant. The quality of our democracy hinges on those decisions.

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.

A quick explainer of how we got to this political moment

Long-time journalist and National Book Award-winner George Packer offers us some context for our current political situation in an Atlantic article. Here are some excerpts:

 

“The Roosevelt Republic — the progressive age that extended social welfare and equal rights to a widening circle of Americans — endured from the 1930s to the 1970s. At the end of that decade, it was overthrown by the Reagan Revolution, which expanded individual liberties on the strength of a conservative free-market ideology, until it in turn crashed against the 2008 financial crisis. 

 

“The era that followed has lacked a convincing name and a clear identity. It’s been variously called the post–post–Cold War, post-neoliberalism, the Great Awokening, and the Great Stagnation. 

 

“But the 2024 election has shown that the dominant political figure of this period is Donald Trump, who, by the end of his second term, will have loomed over American life for as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dozen years as president. We are living in the Trump Reaction.”

 

“This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the ‘browning' of the American people." 

 

“For two and a half centuries American politics alternated between progressive and conservative periods, played between the 40-yard lines of liberal democracy. The values of freedom, equality, and rule of law at least received lip service; the founding documents enjoyed the status of civic scripture; the requisite American mood was optimism. 

 

“Although reaction has dominated local or regional (mainly southern) politics, it’s something new in our national politics — which explains why Trump has been misunderstood and written off at every turn. Reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it paints in dark tones. It wants to undo progress and reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled. They want a strongman with the stomach to trample on the liberal pieties of the elites who sold them out.

 

“This is why so many voters are willing to tolerate — in some cases, celebrate — Trump’s vile language and behavior; his love affairs with foreign dictators; his readiness to toss aside norms, laws, the Constitution itself. Asked by pollsters if they’re concerned about the state of democracy, these voters answer yes — not because they fear its demise, but because it has already failed them. They don’t think Trump will destroy democracy; he’ll restore it to the people.”

Grateful

This Thanksgiving, as always, I’m grateful for you, dear readers.

 

And, as I’ve said before, I’m specifically grateful to the reader who alerted us to the good news aggregators at Australia’s Fix the News.

 

Fix the News founder Angus Hervey, who grew up in apartheid South Africa, wrote in a long essay in response to our U.S. election results, which I ran on Nov. 15:

 

"For the first time since I can remember, I'm not sure the good guys are going to win.

 

"I find myself returning to the lessons of South Africa. That change happened, not because it was inevitable, but because people made it inevitable. Each step forward mattered and people kept on believing in the right thing, even when that belief seemed foolish. In the end the impossible happened not because history ordained it, but because ordinary people kept pushing against the darkness until finally, impossibly, the light broke through.”

 

He said Fix the News will be writing “stories about how progress happens not through some invisible hand of history, but through the visible hands of people who refuse to give up on it.”

 

I emailed Hervey to let him know how much his work means to us here, while, as he put it in his essay, "every media outlet in the world” is "shrieking about Trump,” one way or the other.

 

He emailed back saying he appreciates the encouragement he’s gotten in response to his essay and that he’s feeling "more resolute than ever about the mission of Fix the News.”

 

As Stephen Hawking said, “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.” And blogger Maria Popova pointed out that we’re early in our evolution, so it’s to be expected that we mess things up a lot.

 

I’m grateful for the feeling of belonging and empowerment I get from our global connection to Hervey and others as we all stumble forward as best we can.

The election: Legacy media is told, again, 'They’re just not that into you'

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

In a better world, there would be a period of quiet, of licking wounds, of taking stock, after the shock suffered by both Democrats and legacy media in the presidential election. But in this world, the world we’ve created, the demand for content — always fresh, yet always familiar — is unrelenting. Thus we are subjected to opinions without supporting facts, recriminations without self-reflection, certainty where none exists — and simple explanations for the collective decision of more than 153 million people.

“Devastated Democrats play the blame game,” reads a New York Times headline.

“Where Harris’ campaign went wrong,” CNN was prepared to tell us — on Nov. 6, the day after the election.

“This is all Biden’s fault,” the headline reads on a New York Times op-ed piece by the journalist Josh Barro, who at least took till Nov. 9 to have it all figured out.

Talking heads gonna talk. Pontificators gotta pontificate. Our content-generation enterprises had airtime and screens to fill. And for members of the media, the Democratic defeat was a target-rich environment.

Pundits also scratched their heads at the failure of the public to heed their warnings about Donald Trump, but that didn’t seem to open the floodgates of self-reflection in the most influential newsrooms.

 
New Yorker staff writer Nathan Heller had a thoughtful piece about the way the flow of information had changed, a change that the Trump campaign understood and Harris’ didn’t. He concluded: “In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts. It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth will set the public free. They have corrected misinformation and sought to drop data to individual doors.

 
“This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong. A majority of the American public doesn’t believe information that goes against what it thinks it knows—and a lot of what it thinks it knows originates in the brain of Donald Trump. He has polluted the well of received wisdom and what passes for common sense in America. And, until Democrats, too, figure out how to message ambiently, they’ll find themselves fighting not just a candidate but what the public holds to be self-evident truths.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that conclusion. Here’s what jumps out at me: While Heller poses “ambient information” as a puzzle for Democrats to solve, he makes no mention of journalists. 

 
But aren’t we are all living in an age of babel? The clash of ideas in the public sphere — for which journalism provides a stage — is no longer an intellectual contest. The truth may set you free, but if it can’t garner market share, it’s not winning the day. Election coverage with a primary goal of serving citizens would look very different from coverage with a need to make as much money as possible off the election.

Also, I wonder: How is any of this considered new? Newsrooms have been coping — unsuccessfully — with ambient information for years. A lot of news is now free. Journalism enterprises are struggling against free.  

 

Poynter reporter Angela Fu wrote last December:

“The U.S. has lost more than 130 newspapers — or 2.5 a week — this year, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Since 2005, the country has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers and 43,000 journalists.

“‘A lot of news consumption is happening on social media and even from search,’ said Pew Research Center senior researcher Elisa Shearer. ‘You’re less likely to be getting something directly from a news outlet when you’re getting it in that way.’”

As we’ve discussed repeatedly, the business model on which newspapers were based for more than a century has collapsed, newsrooms have contracted, quality plummeted. News is everywhere in the air, plenty for the average consumer, and it doesn’t cost a thing.

Newsrooms have had a tendency to view the business model as a thing apart — someone else’s problem to solve — while they stayed focused on the important thing: their journalism, writing and editing narratives about the world.

 
But it’s not enough to believe that news is important. The product no longer meets the consumer need. Whatever else it was, the 2024 election was yet another reminder for legacy media that “they’re just not that into you.”

 

 

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.

Fix the News on Trump’s election

This week’s edition is entirely an essay by Fix the News founder Angus Hervey on the meaning of Donald Trump’s reelection from the perspective of a foreigner who’s long respected America’s values and ideals.

 

You’ll want to read the whole thing.