EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Weiss's probably underrated advantage, and the thing that really got her to where she is now, is that her callow reactionary prejudices and politics largely overlap with those of the people who really call the shots in the purportedly liberal news business, but those attitudinal advantages are offset by the fact that she also shares their weird insularity toward the world and the people who work for them, but without any meaningful professional or executive experience to offset it.

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: This just all seems like extremely strange framing for a CONGRESSIONAL MEMO in 2025. Are the House and Senate really blasé about the shutdown exactly or or have they just ceded all their power to a president who can't be made to care? There isn't really much point in working late into the night or even performing the role of working late into the night, when the only person who has any control over the process is sundowning. After the jump, which arrives accompanied by a sly little postage stamp photo of the Capitol dome with an out of focus, DON'T WALK sign in the foreground. The story delivers a revealingly garbled analogy. "Former representative Patrick McHenry, The Times writes, The North Carolina Republican who helped steer the house away from a shutdown in 2023 predicted that the gridlock would continue until lawmakers felt more consequences from their voters for doing nothing. He compared it to a professional wrestling match, where both sides need to force the opposition to submit. 'It's not goodwill that brings policymakers together,' Mr. McHenry said 'it's pain. There's no urgency until the political pain increases.'"

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: There is no job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning. The numbers were reportedly compiled but are not being released, due to the government shutdown. Surely this is a neutral logistical decision on the bureau's part, and the numbers would stay in a file drawer even if they were positive for the Trump administration's economic performance, which most forecasters expected they would not be, or are not. Not sure what tense to use for data that exists but can't be seen.

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: There we have one of the basic problems with writing about the Trump administration and what its officials said, in that pretty much every part of that paraphrase is false. The review was not in response to Donald Trump's executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion. It was quite obviously in response to the government shutdown. Likewise, the specific transportation department rule that Duffy was citing was hastily issued to create a pretextual mechanism for taking away the funds. Duffy announced that the funding had been put under review, and that that review was unfortunately on hold because the lawyers who would do it were unavailable under the shutdown, in a single integrated action.

The story also does not mention that the particular contracting requirements the Duffy claims may violate the rule that he just issued are congressionally mandated and longstanding contracting rules.

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Back on page one, at the top left of the page, the headline is, “Comey Is Stuck In Long Feud With President / A Bad Start Escalated Into an Indictment.” The bad start was James Comey as FBI director telling Donald Trump in their first meeting when Trump was president-elect that there were allegations circulating about Trump and Russia. And so after that meeting, the Times writes, “the two men would be set on a path of escalating conflict and mutual loathing that led last week to a prosecutor handpicked for the task by Mr. Trump, securing an indictment of Mr. Comey.” Sorry, but no, this ain't a feud. This is the president of the United States using all of his available powers and then some to persecute somebody.

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: This is how Peter Baker decided to respond to the spectacle of the complete collapse of the rule of law, by somehow simultaneously assuming the posture of a kindergarten teacher and of a child sucking its thumb on a sleepy mat. Boy, those Republicans sure wouldn't like it if someone treated them the way that they're treating their opponents right now. Yeah, right. That's why they're trying to fix it so that political power never changes hands again. That's the heart of their entire approach. What even is the use of exploring the dumb hypothetical that the Democrats might prove equally lawless in the future? The real question that demands NEWS ANALYSIS right now is whether if the Democrats do manage to take power again, they will shed their own chronic inhibitions and ignore the hand-wringing of people like Baker, and take swift and decisive action not to emulate crimes of the Trump administration but to punish those crimes decisively, abandoning the presumption going all the way back to Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, if not to the violent unwinding of Reconstruction after the Civil War, that the proper way to deal with lawlessness corruption and misrule is to grant the wrongdoers impunity so as not to stir up a fuss and provoke future bad behavior.

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Marjorie Taylor Green, whose entire politics is built around not being able to get along with people, is not getting along with people. Please visit, read, and support INDIGNITY!

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Speaking of declining literacy, in the international news on page A6, there's the headline, “Some Poo-Poo an Italian City Tax Designed to Combat Dog Waste.” That's P-O-O hyphen P-O-O. Completely amateur attempted wordplay. The term “pooh-pooh” for disparaging something is spelled with H’s, so it's not a clever piece of wordplay. It's just the wrong-ass word. Real dogshit effort there.

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Below the jump for that story on page A15, the headline is “SEC dropped a civil complaint against a former client of its Trump-picked chairman. In 2018,” the Times writes, “Paul Atkins was paid $1,450 an hour to be an expert witness by Devin Archer's lawyers as they tried to undermine accusations that their client defrauded a Native American tribal entity and others out of $60 million. While Mr. Archer was convicted anyway, he was pardoned by President Trump in March.” You could write a story about how Republicans would feel if the same fact pattern had unfolded under Joe Biden's SEC. But why bother? The question isn't how they feel about conflicts of interest. It's how they feel about Donald Trump.

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EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: The great difficulty in trying to convey what happens with this president and this presidency is that Donald Trump is a profoundly addled and frivolous person who doesn't care or understand the things he says or does, but he is also the president of the United States, so that the things that he says and does are real and serious. Trying to start from the fact that he is the president and impose a kind of sanity and meaning on his behavior that isn't there while addressing his absurdity and irrationality as supplemental detail to be euphemized or paraphrased creates a perniciously false picture. What the Times did in today's paper is to frankly start with the incoherent rambling and then to assemble a sort of collage around the serious things it means.

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