The News Corporation Limited: No Action, Interpretive And Or: Fill & Download for Free

First, it simply has no chance of passing. There’s no way it gets two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and then three-fourths of all States (38 States).But it’s also a bad implementation—that is, even if I were in support of overturning Citizens United (I’m very much not), this proposed amendment would be a terrible way to do it.Here’s the text—because in constitutional matters, we need to always go to the text:Section I. To advance democratic self-government and political equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral process, Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.Section II. Congress and the States shall have power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and may distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections.Section III. Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the press.OK, so, first thing that catches my eye?It’s got a #$@&%* prefatory clause…You’d think progressives would have learned from butting heads with the Second Amendment for so long that prefatory or purposive clauses never do anything more than muddy the waters.“To advance democratic self-government and political equality, and to protect the integrity of government and the electoral process…”OK, so… who gets to decide if those goals are met or even aimed at in some legislation authorized under this amendment?What if a Republican-controlled Congress (picking on my own side for the sake of example) decides to pass legislation saying that money cannot be raised or spent by persons who are not year-round residents of the jurisdiction in which they are engaging in electioneering activity, and that money cannot be raised or spent to transport or entice persons from outside the jurisdiction to enter the jurisdiction for purposes of electioneering activities?That is, college students can’t fundraise or donate (unless they happen to also live in the same district between semesters and over summer break), people can’t be bused in for protests or rallies, protests and rallies can’t even be advertised outside the particular electorate that the candidate serves or wishes to serve…There’s at least an ironclad rational basis argument that such measures could “advance democratic self-government and political equality [etc.]”. (Remember, “rational basis” is a very low bar and basically just means, “A rational person could believe that this legislation would advance this goal.”)But I suspect Democrats would immediately decry such regulations as partisan and aimed at suppression of activist groups. And honestly, it probably would be.But under this purposive clause, there’s no real argument that it would be unconstitutional.After all, most Republicans sincerely do believe that self-government and governmental integrity are enhanced and protected when decisions are made solely by and for the benefit of individual constituencies, without taking into account the interests or preferences of outsiders. I know I believe that—an election for, say, the MA 3rd Congressional District is best left entirely to residents of the MA 3rd District, and who cares which candidate people from Boston or Connecticut prefer?Now, all of these issues exist with or without this prefatory/purposive clause—my point is that the clause doesn’t help anything.Second…Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limitsOh really? “Reasonable” by whose standards? “Reasonable” in light of which factors?To many Democrats and progressives, it’s “reasonable” to let Michael Moore release an anti-Bush movie just before the 2004 elections, but to prohibit Citizens United from releasing an anti-Hillary movie in 2008.To me, it’s unreasonable to treat speech via a paid medium any differently than any other speech.Congress and the States shall have power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and may distinguish between natural persons and corporations or other artificial entities created by law, including by prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections.I’ll keep coming back to this basic point: WHY?What is a “corporation” other than a group of citizens pooling resources and acting collectively?If Alice can spend money to influence an election, and Bob can, and Carol can, and Dave can, and Errol can, and Fran can…And if Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave, and Errol can all give their money to Frances to facilitate her efforts…Why should “ABCDEF Corp.” be disallowed from spending the same money for the same message?The only practical difference is that the shareholders are not personally liable in suits against the corporation—but no one has credibly alleged that the problem with corporate contributions is tortious conduct, so I fail to see the relevance.And then of course, there is direct conflict between Section 2, above, and Section 3, below…Nothing in this article shall be construed to grant Congress or the States the power to abridge the freedom of the press.That’s interesting, because Citizens United was all about freedom of the press.So we’ve got really only three options here:“Congress and the States can regulate campaign expenditures only in ways that do not conflict with preexisting free press precedents.”In which case the amendment fails at its primary goal of overturning Citizens United.“Congress and the States cannot abridge freedom of the press, but exercise of the powers granted by this amendment are definitionally not abridgments, any conflicting precedents notwithstanding.”In which case Section 3 is utterly nugatory, since it only says, “Other than the changes we’re making here, Congress’s powers remain the same”—which is axiomatically true of each and every amendment.“We have completely and willfully misunderstood the meaning of ‘press’ in the First Amendment and are exempting solely traditional news media from the restrictions authorized herein.”Which is both, as noted, a corruption of the term “freedom of the press” (which never referred specifically to “the press” in the sense of “news media”), and also constitutes an entirely arbitrary carveout privileging certain forms of expression based on a frankly amorphous category (e.g., does “the press” include only media outlets which publish print versions of their stories? Does it include those plus broadcast networks? Does it try to split some sort of hair whereby HuffPo and Bloomberg are “real news media” and Breitbart isn’t?).And as we look at the FAQ put out by the sponsors, we see another problem:What about other corporate constitutional rights? Will unions get special treatment?The Democracy for All Amendment will allow state and federal lawmakers to pass laws that restrict or eliminate spending in our elections by all forms of private, artificial entities – including corporations, nonprofits, unions, and more. It would not change other Supreme Court interpretations regarding corporate rights in other areas of the law.It certainly sounds like States or Congress would be free to have one standard for commercial corporations, another for PACs, another for interest groups, and an entirely different one for unions.I mean, that’s what it looks like to me from the text, but the FAQ appears to confirm that it’s on purpose. I see nothing in the amendment or the FAQ that mandates equal treatment across classes of “artificial entities”.That sounds a lot like “picking winners” to me.For instance, you know Democrats will never pass any law that prohibits unions from engaging in political activities.But in terms of “democracy-based” justifications, unions have less of a claim to legitimacy than 501(c)(4) interest groups, because they collect mandatory dues rather than only voluntary donations, so there is no guarantee that every one of their “supporters” actually supports their political stance—unlike, say, the Federalist Society, where we can be nearly 100% certain that every dues-payer actually supports the FedSoc’s ideals. [NB: This isn’t about unions—I’m just illustrating that there is no principled standard for the differential treatment of different categories that I’m certain we’d see.]It’s just a bad effort.And it’s predictably being touted as “bipartisan” meaning “we got one of the leftmost Republican Congressmen to sign on.”This will go into the same dustbin as the gun control bill I briefly reviewed a month ago.Original Question:“Will Citizens United be overturned by this Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL) action?”

Why stop with the Axis?In mid-1936, a Nazi SS anthropological expedition delves deep into the wilderness of Finnish Karelia led by Yrjö von Grönhagen to record pagan legends and chants in the hopes of furthering their pseudoscientific quest for information on a mythical Aryan dominion of the world. Their efforts are met with limited success until they are directed to the home of Miron-Aku, the home of a mysterious woman believed by locals to be a witch.When they arrive, instead of meeting an old woman, they find a gaunt, very tall man speaking with a softly sussurating accent amidst a hut filled with mysterious herbs and the skins and bones of animals. He claims to be a powerful seer and to have foreseen their arrival. Disappointment that Miron-Aku is not there is instantly tempered by the revelation that this man claims to know several ancient, ancestral pagan rituals for summoning ancestral spirits that can divine future events. The SS expedition quickly sets up their camera and tape recorder and records the seer’s summoning ceremony.In what appears to be a ritual trance, the seer takes a deep, rattling breath, and suddenly advances on Grönhagen to take his shoulders. Looking deep into his eyes, he intones a prophecy: trampled glory, shattered nations, mothers crying for sons, a proud people so downtrodden as to love their own slavery… and a lament for an ancient power, lost, that could be their salvation but for the skepticism of the degenerate, lost amid ancient stones and weathered rock.The seer slowly twiches and returns to lucidity, while the SS expedition, shocked at the starkness of the prophecy and the eerie resonance of their situation, asks the seer what it could mean. He shakes his head, feigning ignorance. The SS team takes photographs and sketches of the hut, and then returns to Germany to report their findings to Heinrich Himmler, head of the Ahnenerbe, his erstwhile quixotic archeology initiative.By chance, the Ahnenerbe presents the findings of the Grönhagen expedition just as the team led by Wolfram Sievers is preparing to leave for the Bohuslän petroglyph sites in Northwestern Sweden. The prophecy piques the interest of Himmler and his interest in the occult, but Sievers is intrigued by the similarity of a few symbols daubed on animal skins in the seer’s hut with the pictures of the petroglyphs that initiated interest in his Swedish expedition. The figure of a torso of two concentric circles crowned with horns on a pair of long legs in particular repeated itself throughout the hut, along with a set of concentric spiked wheels within a sunburst of eight barbed points.The motif of the man was evident throughout Bohuslän, but the sunburst and circle symbol only appeared once - at first. Through chance examination, Sievers came across it in an ancient stone, half-buried and obscured by foliage. He ordered its excavation, finding the stone densely covered with petroglyphs - undeniably writing. It is the find of a lifetime, and Sievers excitedly orders a full excavation.It is 1937, and Heinrich Himmler feels vindicated. Translation of the Bohuslän tablets has made a major breakthrough. Initially cryptic diagrams are successfully interpreted as maps of the parts of the Italian Alps, the French Pyrenees, and an ancient map of pagan Saxony denoting the location of the fabled Irmunsul, the pillar of ancient Germanic religion. Already seeking to depose Christianity from its cultural hegemony and excited at the prospect of recovering ancient religious rituals, Himmler orders his cronies in the Ahnenerbe to begin searching for the marked site in the black forest of Rhine-Westphalia. What they find is beyond their wildest dreams. Not only are there petroglyphs like at Bohuslän, but a wealth of runic inscriptions on cult practices and devotional sacrifices - runes that can be easily translated from the collective scholarship on Germanic sagas of old.Himmler quickly seizes upon the written rituals to further his transformation of the SS into a cultural force that can oppose Christianity. The first hints of neopagan cult practices are forwarded down the chain of the insular SS command, where weddings and award ceremonies are the first to feature recovered rituals to grant blessings of foresight, health and memory. Soon after, translation of the petroglyphs undergoes a major breakthrough, and academics under Himmler compile a book of cult practices and allegedly Germanic rituals.While Hitler allows Himmler what he believes to be his “nonsense” fantasies, so long as the latter displays unquestioning obedience and participates in his schemes, the Führer feels he can safely ignore the increasingly bizarre antics of the SS’s inner circle. Himmler slowly schemes to insert the SS into every aspect of daily life, even while carrying out Hitler’s orders on preparing for the final solution.Himmler’s passion for the occult and his belief in the power of the ancient Germanic religious texts his pet archeologists are rapidly translating is leading him to begin to integrate them into his daily life. In 1938, on one of his infrequent visits home to visit his wife and livestock farm in Bavaria, he stages a small ritual sacrifice of a black stork and a newborn calf. Thereafter, despite his absences, his wife’s previously failing attempts to profitably manage their farm begin to reverse as her competence rapidly, but otherwise inexplicably, increases.Elated by this success, Himmler promulgates orders that cult ceremonies begin in the Wewelsburg castle near Paderborn, where artifacts from the Irmunsul excavation have already been transported. Himmler’s inner circle reluctantly carry out the rituals, which involve animal sacrifice and invocation of ancient deities in Old Istvaeonic. He is less than successful at inspiring true devotion. Whatever the zeal of the SS’s youthful followers and the ease with which the older members of the SS’s inner circle accepted the sexual liberty and other convenient aspects of Himmler’s increasingly mystic pagan views, the grip of Christian tradition on them is strong.It is early 1942. The war has slowed the promulgation of the SS’s new neopagan religion, but it is beginning to perhaps make itself more deeply felt.In Germany, the increasing volume of pagan rituals and other finds from the Irmunsul excavation, as well as seemingly corroboratory finds from as far away as Tibet causes Himmler to order a review of the cultural practices of the SS and to purge elements that no longer have direct archaeological support. At this point, with the SS greatly expanded over the course of the war, the fervent core of believers has been diluted to 20 percent. Himmler is disappointed, but continues recruitment into his paramilitary corps; meanwhile, he is also distracted by a new project.The Führer has ordered the beginning of the final solution. Himmler’s underlings begin to carry out extermination of the population of concentration camps. Coincidentally, some of the latest rituals to come out of the Irmunsul excavation hint at greater rewards of knowledge and foresight from commensurately greater sacrifices. Himmler resolves to begin putting the degenerates in his camps to good use.The first pagan rituals take place in Buchenwald, lobotomizing terrified homosexuals and Jews to the sound of Istvaeonic chants. Most die silently. Some, however, do not. Instead, a strange energy seizes them and animates them before they die. They cry. They laugh. They snarl. They babble. And rather than the incoherent sounds of aphasia, their spittle-flecked rants have the ring of truth. Initially the jaded “scientists” of the SS dutifully record their experiments as requested from on high, convinced that these are flukes. Then one of the dying prisoners bears his teeth in a rictus of joy at a researcher hidden behind one-way glass, calls him by name, and tells him that to seek knowledge is not a sin, when it might have saved his son. Three days later he receives a telegram.Thereafter, the SS pays renewed attention to the often barely voices from their dying victims. They find, just barely, coherence within the madness. Whispers of the power to save. To heal. To prolong life. To bring prosperity. To warn. To plot. To see. And throughout the rants, always spoken of in a mixture of fear and awe, a name. Tzeentch.In early 1944, a prophecy from the Buchenwald experiments is quickly forwarded up the chain of command until it catches the attention of Himmler. It speaks of a plot to shatter the dreams of a head crowned, and of a wounded lion whose pride drives him to vengeance. Still doubtful of his prophecy factory’s capacity to produce anything beyond short-term predictions, Himmler’s doubts are removed after an investigation of the activities of senior staff officers wounded earlier in the war. Uncovering a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, he preemptively strikes in early March, decapitating the plot as he further purges the ranks of the military’s top echelons. He allows the Führer to believe that it was his vigilance, not his experiments, that gave him the edge.Now fully aware of the power at his hands, Himmler meets with the head of his Buchenwald project, a large, wheelchair-bound, bookish and unprepossessing man who keeps his hands gloved and his lap covered with a blanket. Though disabled from a spinal wound in the last war, the man is brilliant, and Himmler is delivered a summary of the team’s efforts at reconstructing the fragmented arcana babbled forth from the sterile torture chambers in Thuringia. Though the researcher dismisses the fragments as useless, Himmler, beginning to believe that there was more power than could be had from Jews and gypsies, eagerly keeps the report.Two months later, responding to the orders of the Führer himself, Himmler forms the Oberkommando Oberrhein to deal with the Western Allies’ invasion of Normandy. Though an inexperienced military commander placed in command more for reasons of morale than actual talent, his subcommanders are surprised to find Himmler actively involved in strategic discussion and raising talented subordinates to positions of responsibility where they will be most effective without even having to consult his advisors. While he appears to be losing sleep, coming to meetings with bleary eyes and sagging skin, his talent for logistics and anticipating Allied movements become apparent. Himmler is intimately and deeply involved in the planning of the major operation to come, sleeping less than two hours per day and in some cases micromanaging the drafting of the operational orders down to individual brigade levels. In late 1944, at the orders of Hitler, the Ardennes offensive begins.At Himmler’s insistence, individual Fallschirmjager units are deployed early, and a major force is assembled by weakening key other parts of the offensive to drop additional units to seize roads east of Liege. The attack achieves complete surprise, and in the Northern sector in particular the German forces advance according to the ambitious plan. German units capture Liege and Huy along the Meuse, held up only by the prospect of their flanks being exposed after tough resistance from the undersupplied troops in Bastogne hold up the southern part of the advance. Himmler, seemingly aware of the issue despite spotty lines of communication and units lost in the fog of war, somehow convinces the Luftwaffe to commit their limited tactical assets to the roads surrounding the town with grid coordinates he specifies himself. Despite extremely poor weather, the remaining Luftwaffe assets manage to shoot up convoys of reinforcements into Bastogne. It falls in two days, and the German units held up by it begin a slow but grinding advance to the River Meuse.After 72 hours of frenetic activity without sleep, Himmler collapses in his command post and is sent to rest. Although behind schedule, the offensive is going well- until reports come in that the American 7th army is penetrating the Southern flank. Awoken from his bed where he had slept for 36 hours, Himmler, visibly agitated by his earlier collapse and muttering about the consequences of disobedience, immediately issues a set of orders he had insisted on drafting but his commanders did not envision ever using. While isolated units are left behind, over the next few days the majority of the invasion force withdraws across the Rhine.Despite the tactical victory, including considerable damage inflicted and thousands of prisoners taken, Hitler flies into a rage at the strategic loss and depletes the assets given to Oberkommando Oberrhein to send back to the Eastern Front, which was shattering under the force of the Soviet offensive that had destroyed the German Army Group Centre a few months earlier. Himmler, who by now has the respect (but not the admiration) of his commanders, leaves his staff meeting after announcing the orders without any further comment. As he departs the conference room, General Hausser whispers to his adjutant to ask if he had noticed the bony growths under Himmler’s scalp and neck before.It is April 1945, and the death of the Third Reich is at hand. Himmler has known for months that it would happen - and how. Voices whisper in his ears, even as they are painfully deformed by the bony spikes now protruding beneath his hair. The pain, though, is secondary to the power. He cuts off contact with his wife and with Hitler, trusting only in the surety of prophecy that he believes has kept him from harm. If his thoughts wander, he can see slavering maws overlaid with gleaming cities, purple flames, masked giants towering over men, a smoldering landscape, and of himself in the mirror crowned and beautiful. He has a mind to escape to Sweden, but instead heads towards the source of so much of the power he feels coursing through his body. Buchenwald.Though partially evacuated at his orders, the camp is still teeming with life and the scientific staff have left their notes. Himmler instinctively hides himself, drawing upon the whispered offers of power he hears every waking minute. He feels connected to every life sacrificed on the altar of his knowledge. He enters the building in which his gruesome experiments began. It appears abandoned. Opening a door to the operating suite, he glances briefly at a bloodstain in the corner before dropping his briefcase to the floor. The voice whispers of his place in the destiny of the world. He smiles - and is impaled from behind by a burning sword. As Himmler falls, twisted bone spikes along his spine press against and tear through his shirt.The first American elements arrive in Buchenwald within the hour.The NKVD agents that take control of Buchenwald are careful to loot all the intelligence that they can. Though the USSR’s hard-won tactical excellence, doctrine, and materiel had won the day, interrogation of SS prisoners had revealed disturbing accounts of German subcommanders with foreknowledge of events that did not seem possible, who spoke of bizarre rituals and acts of divine will.Four months later, NKVD agents execute a plan to assassinate anti-Soviet partisan leaders in the Baltics and Ukraine in less than a day. Their operation goes flawlessly. News that the German mystic rituals, even stripped of their absurd religious trappings, delivers real results is suppressed by Beria, who orders a secret operation to systematically investigate the utility of German Tzeentch worship.Soon the purges begin.American intelligence experts are quicker to discard the pagan nonsense and nearly illegible scribblings they find among Himmler’s personal papers and bloodstains in Buchenwald. Rumors of a private purge within the NKVD and the USSR’s otherwise opaque leadership structure leave them worried, but things stay strictly within the bounds of rational thought - until intelligence agents and other assets across the globe are suddenly systematically targeted or subverted. Reeling from the inhumanly effective campaign, the US Central Intelligence Group (CIG) pulls out its official cover embassy staff from Moscow. They bring with them rumors that a terrified clandestine source had brought to their attention just before the purge.It is 1956. The USSR has grown by leaps and bounds under the careful but forceful stewardship of Beria, who replaces Stalin in 1952. The clandestine power of German discoveries has taken the planned economy to new heights of productivity. A new head of Gosplan - a close Beria ally and an energetic reformer despite being disabled from war wounds - has vastly reformed the bureaucracy and increased the effectiveness of the Soviet economy by leaps and bounds. What few reports come out of the Soviet Union suggest that it is rapidly outgrowing the United States, which is met by disbelief on the part of American leadership. Boasts of missile and bomber capability are routine, but alarmed officials hear rumors of Soviet superweapons under development that surpass even the hydrogen bomb that they test in 1953.In the upper echelons of the United States, the news about weapons development in the USSR comes as a surprise, but not one entirely unexpected. While German discoveries have caused revelations in the way the nascent CIA conducts human intelligence operations and has been carefully shared with the RAND corporation, in 1954 President Eisenhower’s administration orders a halt to all occult weapons research and orders the military to standardize its strategic deterrent based on nuclear weapons. For now, the United States maintains a technological edge, even as the two nations’ wage a heavy-handed strategic grapple.The first U-2 overflights of Soviet territory confirm that the Soviets have overstated their military capabilities - at least, the ones they talk about. But U-2 overflights also confirm industrial capacity and economic activity well beyond that thought possible from such a low base. Private analysts employed by government think tanks estimate that the Soviet Union will overtake the United States economically by 1965.All of that talk suddenly becomes sidelined in October of 1956.Interrogation of the few refugees from Budapest that make it into West Germany in mid-December 1956 paint a confused picture. It is not just the incipient madness of the refugees, but the fantastical nature of what they describe in conjunction with aerial photoreconnaissance.U-2 overflights provide still images of Budapest in flames, outlying suburbs replaced by gaping chasms in a matter of days, and a disturbing lack of vehicles leaving the area. Reports from the crying refugees, however, speak of shifting, ephemeral forms, colored fire, shambling bodies, and cruel men with guns. American intelligence soon after intercepts memoranda congratulating the KGB on successful tests of Project Perun.In 1958, more than artillery shells begin to land on Kinmen and Matsu off the coast of China. While KMT troops are already used to bombardment, they are not accustomed to the fiery projectiles that land upon their bunkers as if they have a mind of their own. Nor are they accustomed to the hungry tendrils of flame reaching into their trenches and cruelly devouring them as they scream.News that the PLA is deploying occult weaponry stuns Nationalist command in Taiwan, but produces nothing but grim resolve from Eisenhower. At the urging of his national security advisors, who discard warnings from the intelligence establishment divining fire and blood, he opts to punish the Chinese Communists for the use of such forbidden weaponry with a nuclear strike. After forwarding orders to General LeMay, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff mysteriously disappears.The news of a nuclear strike galvanizes action in the USSR. Beria, whose wavering support of the PLA is balanced by intelligence showing a low level of preparedness from the United States, unhesitatingly invokes the full power of Project Perun. At Chernobyl in the Ukranian SSR and Petropavlosk in the Russian SSR, a sacrifice of political prisoners is accompanied by the chanting of men in robes who slowly rise in the air. Finally released, foul engines, flying nightmares and hordes of slobbering chaos horrors boil forth towards Western Europe and the West Coast of the United States.Such action does not go undetected. As soon as news of the rituals reaches Eisenhower, he orders an immediate total release of nuclear weapons. NATO forces, already on high alert, mobilize across Europe - but to very little end.As nuclear fire consumes the Communist bloc and a very different kind of fire toys with what will only be the “free world” for a few days longer, a slowly chanting figure rises above the portal to the Immaterium that was Chernobyl, sprouting wings from his back, claws on his hands, and thousands of tendrils from across his body.When schemes spanning hundreds of years are a staple of the servants of the Prince of Plots, one requiring a mere three solar decades is child’s play.(I am not affiliated with Games Workshop)

My apologies in advance for the novel here; I tend to get on rolls!The first thing you need to realize is that actually—and despite Trump's and his sycophants’ almost constant accusations of the mainstream media being “fake news” and “biased against him”—most (or all) of the denigration of him and his administration and the Trumpublican Senate that you see in the media is “unbiased.” I worked in journalism for years; the MSM isn’t, and never has been, saying anything about Trump and his “team” that isn’t true. Certainly, the anchors that deliver the news to the viewers and the reporters who publish the printed articles are opinionated, but that started neither with Trump nor with any other political figure. It started when what used to be (mostly) three major TV networks that announced the news twice a day and local news outlets that delivered mostly local news every morning and evening for a half hour began to morph into 24-hour-a-day news programs, and when the internet began to publish news reports (by-the-minute and nonstop) online that people used to have to wait for their daily newspapers to arrive to find out about. People often say, “What happened to news like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather and Huntley and Brinkley used to deliver—unemotional, professional, nonpartisan, non-opinionated, and truthful?” The only thing that “happened” to the news media was technology. Whereas the television anchors and in-print reporters used to have limited time and space to give the public the news—and whereas they only had two or possibly three competitors to have to “outdo”—they now have an unlimited amount of airtime and can just go online and update, correct, add onto, and pontificate on their reports at any time, for any amount of time. And they now have to compete for audience attention with every news agency in the entire free world. Twenty-four-hour-a-day cable news isn’t an easy thing to deliver without it quickly becoming repetitive and uninteresting, and ultimately turning off the audiences. They had to become more broad, more aggressive, much more political, and they had to figure out ways to keep people’s attention and to tune them in (or have them read) for as long as possible, because if they can’t maintain anyone's interest, there are millions of other stations and sources that the audiences can and will turn to. So they started having “talking head shows” instead of professional anchors, who were reporting only “hard news” and keeping their opinions to themselves. These “new news” people can now organize and sit on panels, call in guest speakers, make commentary out of what, in the “old days,” was just simple reporting—and eat up a lot of air time and internet space, which is their exact intention. The mainstream media—a term that wasn’t even extant in the days of Walter Cronkite—are not “fake news;” what they actually report on is almost always truthful. They’re just much more vocal and pontifical and obviously partisan than they were ever allowed to be before they went “around the clock.” They pretty much have to be if they want to get ratings (and advertisers) by getting people to tune in or subscribe; there’s frequently nothing else to do when the camera is trained on them for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But the anchors’ actual reporting is “real news;” most of it can stand up to the most minute fact-checking, and if they want to be considered “mainstream” and it turns out that anything, no matter how trivial (such as misspelling someone’s name in a written article or incorrectly stating the time a certain event took place), that they reported on wasn’t true, they’re obligated to announce or print a retraction as soon as they’re made aware of the error. Other than that, though, what you’re hearing as far as actual happenings, statistics, numbers, quotes, and factual events go on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC—-all those news sources that Trump likes to tout as “fake news” just because their reports aren’t favorable to him—are, in fact, legitimate news sources, as long as you’re able to just digest and interpret the data and tune out the conjecture and presupposition, which you’re going to get no matter what news source you obtain your information from. The fact that, for example, you’re a conservative and the network or newspaper you’re looking at tends to interpret data from a liberal perspective doesn’t change the veracity of the data; it’s still “real news,” and it still “really happened.”That said, and to answer the question, the fact is that many undecided voters are being gaslighted by Trump and his cronies and his sadly deluded base of supporters. They want you to believe—-simultaneously—that Trump is and would continue to be “the bigliest, bestest president in the history of America” while at the same time they bemoan how terrible everything is right now and how “only Trump can fix it.” They’re, in effect, saying, “The country is in very bad shape right now; vote for four more years of it.” (They don’t seem aware of the fact that we got in such “very bad shape” during the four years of Trump, and that if he hasn’t “fixed it” by now, he’s not going to.)As an undecided voter, you especially need to remember that when Trump first took office, we were in relatively good shape. The economy was roaring; businesses were booming; unemployment rates were down from over 12% at the height of the Great Recession to under 5%. We all may have had our political differences (whenever haven’t we?) but we weren’t at each other’s throats as we are on a constant basis now. We’ve (until 2017) had very good relationships with our historical allies and a common dislike of authoritarian regimes, we were respected by the rest of the world’s developed and developing countries, and we were usually known as “the leader of the free world.” Under Trump, all that has been partially or totally destroyed. Let’s take a realistic look at what he’s done to undermine, or obliterate, every principle and freedom and liberty and right (except, of course, for the Second Amendment) that has always heretofore been supposed to define America.His neverending battles with other world leaders and his disastrous trade wars with China;His utter ineptitude for the job and his lack of knowledge of (and respect for) the Constitution;His every-two-minutes outright lies to the American people;His removing of the United States from global pacts and treaties due to his utter lack of understanding of their importance;His overt and blatant misuse and abuse of the powers granted to the presidency;His attempt to “revive” the proven inefficacy of “trickledown economics” and subsequent bloating of the national deficit in order to give enormous tax cuts to the already-wealthy and the big corporations;His shutting down the government for a record thirty-five days, bringing the financial needs of federal employees and the day-to-day operations they’re in charge of to a staggering (and very messy) halt just because of a notion to build a totally useless, geographically impossible, hideously expensive, and unwanted-by-the-majority “border wall” between the US and Mexico;His still-being-uncovered past and present criminality;His flouting of all presidential protocols and his deliberate divisiveness and polarization and politicalization of the American people;His fear-mongering and “buck-passing” about and of every single negative happening in the country to his perceived “enemies,” and his constant attempts to incite hatred of each other among American citizens (and his evident delight in doing so);His dangerous narcissism and sociopathy that forbids him to show any compassion or empathy for anyone outside his immediate family (and even they aren’t immune to his vengeance if they ever dare to contradict or go against him in any way);His completely abysmal handling of the coronavirus crisis and of his absolute lack of any kind of plan to pull the nation out of the worst pandemic in a century and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression;His total incapability of dealing with the racial strife now sweeping the country—in fact, his overt support of what only he sees as “law and order” over the legitimate grievances of the people—-not to mention his deliberate thwarting of their First Amendment right to peaceful protest;His presidential pardoning of convicted criminals who were acting on his behalf;His cronyism, nepotism, and political-ally hiring of people with no experience whatsoever in the field in which he’s placed them (e.g. putting a Fox News talking head in the position of US Ambassador and the placing of Chad Wolf, a stalwart Trumpster, in the Secretary of Homeland Security office when Wolf has zero background in law or law enforcement [he worked for the TSA and then as a Republican Party lobbyist before taking on the Secretary role—Chad Wolf - Wikipedia—but he’s a fervent Trumpster, and that’s the only qualification he needs to have]);His open and public demoting, firing, “re-positioning,” or replacing of anyone working in the public sector who isn't blindly loyal to him, rather than to truth and their country, and his regular dismissing of anyone in a leadership legal position who might be investigating his activities. (E.g. Geoffrey Berman of the SDNY who was looking into some nefarious actions Trump appeared to have been involved in, as well as his bullying and humiliation of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman who, true to his military oath to protect and defend the Constitution, told the truth to Congress about what he knew concerning Trump’s impeachable offenses regarding Ukraine and he was escorted out of the White House—he later resigned from his life-long career as a dedicated Army officer because Trump was seeing to it that he’d never get the promotion that he was rightfully due);His unmitigated sham of an “impeachment” where everybody, including his sycophantic Senate (which he knew would acquit him no matter what, and of course they did), knew he was guilty of abuse of power and yet which everyone also knew he’d never be convicted of—which simply outlined, highlighted, and plainly demonstrated his complete lack of accountability for anything he does;His literally-defined authoritarianism and his introduction of what amounts to a police state in “the land of the free;” he ordered unidentifiable “police guards,” as well as the National Guard, to disperse peaceful protesters in Liberty Square, in front of the White House, by rubber-bulleting, tear-gassing, and flame-grenading the largely quiet, peaceful crowds so that he could pose with an upside-down Bible in front of a boarded-up church, evidently to broadcast his image as “the law and order” president—he later sent DHS agents dressed in military garb to snatch peaceful protesters off the streets and into unmarked vehicles without cause or charges, did the teargas routine with a group of mothers who were simply chanting “Leave our kids alone,” and threatened to send these goon squads into “all Democrat-controlled cities” to do likewise;His aggressive attempts to defund and hopefully starve the US Postal Service prior to the November election so that pandemic-ravaged Americans cannot exercise their Constitutional right to vote (and most likely vote him out of office) without exposing themselves to a deadly disease; andHis overt threats to impose his version of “law and order” on the entire country (or at least on “Democrat-controlled city and state governments”) that far exceed his Constitutional authority and which he does, anyway—because by now, there’s no way for anyone to stop him.None of these things are “fake news;” none are the result of “just bias against Trump.” They’re actual events; they really happened. Everyone saw and heard them happen with their own eyes and ears. Certainly the MSM was opinionated (and extremely verbal) about these things as they unfolded, but (as explained above) that doesn’t make them untrue or make the actual events “biased.” If you’re truly undecided about for whom to vote into office in November, you need to take these things (and this is a relatively abbreviated list of Trump’s flagrant dismissal of Constitutional strictures, the law, and the truth; there are many, many more) into account—-because it’s not going to stop and it’ll very likely get worse. You need to ask yourself if you really want to have four more years of Trump’s America (or possibly more; one of the amendments Trump would love to abolish is the 22nd, which limits any one president to two four-year terms). Because that’s exactly what we have right now. If you truly feel that America is “in a great place right now,” as Trump and his supporters insist it is, then you’re certainly within your rights as an American voter to tick the box for Trump again.Just remember that if you give him what he’s so determined to get—unlimited, unquestioned, unaccountable, and permanent authority to do absolutely anything he wants—then you’re going to have to shoulder the burden of accountability for, and live with, that choice, whatever happens to us by 2024 (or even farther into the future if Trump has his way, and we’ve all seen that he’ll do anything at all to get “his way”). In this one election, you’ve really only got two choices, no matter who may decide to run as an Independent or on a smaller party’s ticket—and the choices are a return to sanity or a complete and total (and quite probably irremediable) fall into the abyss of tyrannical authoritarianism. And that’s not just a reverse position of the asinine predictions about the total anarchy and lawlessness and “far-left radical,” “unsafe” country that Trump and all his die-hard fans keep portending at his conventions and Rose Garden speeches would be “Joe Biden’s America.” That’s reality. We’ve all seen it. We’ve all heard it. We’ve all lived it for the past four years. So has the rest of the world.It really doesn’t matter in the fresh hell that’s been the year 2020 whether you “like” Joe Biden or Kamala Harris; I’m not a fan of either myself. But for this election, my opinion is:Biden/Harris=sanity; Trump/Pence=unmitigated, unstoppable madness. I don’t expect Biden to be a great president; he probably won’t be if he wins. But I do expect him to be a president, and that he will do. He’s also unlikely to run for a second term at the (by then) age of 83, so I don’t think he’ll hurt us any more for four years—and he’s sane. For this election, that’s good enough for me. I just hope it is for the rest of the country, because any more overt displays of insanity from the current so-called “government” will just make America one giant failed experiment. And we have too much potential to allow that to happen.Sorry, just one quick addendum: Trumpsters, like anyone else, are free to say anything they want should they happen to read this and want to go on a rant about “all the great things Trump has done for the country” and how anyone who’s against him “must hate America.” For the time being, anyway, we still have a First Amendment. But I will not wade into the swamp with them. Period. If anyone must defend this domestic threat to the country and its Constitution, they can do it, but I won’t read it or answer them. Nothing anybody can say in his favor will impress me, shame me, embarrass me, or change my mind, so they’re just wasting their time and mine. That is all.