Mercedes Schneider writes in her blog that Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is in hot water because of a CNN exposé of his lewd and unhinged posts on porn sites. CNN admitted that some of his posts were so XXXX-rated that it would neither post them nor even link to them.
Mercedes, no less fastidious than CNN, decided that the public should know why this man is morally and ethically unfit to be the Governor of North Carolina.
She posted the links to posts by Robinson that demonstrate his lack of character, decency, and morality.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have found a trove of Ms. Schnieder’s reporting on the inimitable/ignoble Betsy DeVos as I scrolled through your blog. As a retired Texas school teacher who still substitutes in our local high school, I have taken on the voucher wars as our governor seeks to destroy public education. Cruella DeVos and her evil minion Corey DeAngelis abhorrently attack anyone who challenges them. How can I retain access to Ms. Schnieder’s DeVos files so that I can continue to gather more ammunition for Texas teachers and administrators?
You are my Shero in the defense against charlatan billionaires who seek to scam the education-for-all purposes of state constitutions.
Beth Willis…old middle school teacher, parent, grandparent, citizen
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Thanks, Beth.
Mercedes has written three books, all worth reading.
I will send your message to her.
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Still, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is a light weight compared to the convicted rapist, fraud, felon, malignant-narcissist, lifelong cheater, liar, and dictator-lover Traitor Trump.
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The more the facts are revealed about the moral qualities of the MAGA-GOP and the lack of basic knowledge by so many other MAGA-GOP candidates, the more I’m convinced that they are scraping the bottom of the barrows of their candidate pools and finding that any qualified candidate is fleeing as fast as they can.
There was a story today by Nate Silver that the NYT is questioning the validity of many of the polls and seeing a possibility of a major Political ReAlignment in the works.
I’ve been noticing that here in Ottawa County Michigan, where the Christian Nationalist Religious Right has taken over the County GOP and our County Board of Commissioners that there are far fewer “Trump” and other MAGA-GOP campaign signs. Their supporters have suddenly became silent. And, for the first time I’m seeing a lot of signs for Harris/Walz, and Democratic candidates for local offices. You can sense a shift in the mood of people. We are overhearing conversations in the local bars and coffee shops between folks who we used to see in MAGA red hats talking about “Can you believe Trump is that stupid? Does he really believe Detroit and Michigan are failing economically? Where does he get off?”
We need to keep working to defeat and destroy the MAGA-GOP. We need to find a way to end the “Corporations are People with free speech rights” and “Money is Speech” that is the result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Do that will partly defang Michigan’s worst gift to the nation, Betsy DeVos. [We know her well, she attended my wife’s High School!].
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I assume you saw the Times story today about Detroit’s ongoing revitalization
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Funny that Trump goes to Detroit to warn that if Kamala is elected, the whole country will be like Detroit. Insulting!
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I think few if any of the people attending that speech actually live in Detroit.
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A worrying thing is that Trump is out there campaigning hard. People have been seeing him in person much more than they’ve seen Harris. People see him campaigning on video much more than they see Harris. I question whether she’s been doing enough in this home stretch.
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Trump’s evisceration of Detroit while in Detroit makes perfect sense only when you consider the fact that he was speaking to a white audience. As usual, the Putin puppet’s divisive stance is that our nation will be wrecked by those Others in Detroit.
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Harris’s taking to podcasts and social media full force makes her relatively low visibility in rallies less worrisome to me.
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Just curious why you think Kamala hasn’t been doing rallies or public appearances?
Could it be that the media just ignores Kamala’s rallies and gives Trump’s rallies outsize coverage?
Remember when Kamala was excoriated for not doing more media and only rallies and that was blamed for why voters didn’t trust her?
Now she is doing media appearances and her rallies are barely covered, and that’s being blamed for why voters don’t trust her.
In the last month she has been given the media’s “we have to show our balance by framing every story about the Dem as a TRUST issue – Dems are always untrustworthy – and we have to show our balance by mentioning negatives about Trump in stories that never ever mention the words trust, concern, worry, or anything except the love Trump voters have for him.
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Just math. https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/trump-outpaces-harris-walz-campaign-events-run-final/story?id=113932634
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I didn’t say she hasn’t been doing rallies or public appearances. I said she’s been doing far fewer than Trump. I said that because it’s true.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/trump-outpaces-harris-walz-campaign-events-run-final/story?id=113932634
There is an objective reality outside media.
Bill raises a valid point, however.
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I was replying to Bill.
I notice that in the article you linked to, the definition of “event” for Trump includes what is not an “event” when Kamala does it.
Where exactly do you think Kamala was for the past 3 days? Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina…she has been doing multiple campaign events.
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The article was from 3 days ago.
I have never had an interaction with you that was worthwhile. Always stuff like this.
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I guess Kamala listened to all the people who were criticizing her for ONLY doing rallies).
Now that Trump is doing rallies again, she is criticized for not doing MORE rallies. Despite still doing many rallies.
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Anyone running for office, who’s found in connecrtion with porn, violence, etc., etc., etc., showing complete lack of, moral responsibilities, and therefore, should get, eliminated from the, list of nominatef candidates running for, office. I mean, what CAN the people, EXPECT, from a, SEX-ADDICTED, “head of state”? But, with the Republican Party, following Trump’s, corrupted “leadership”, the people simply can’t, expect these, government officials to, take responsiblilties for their, own bad, behaviors, how can the people, expect that if elected, he will, do what benefit the majority of voters in the, state he governs?
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From threesome loving Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler and her husband Christian, to Mark Robinson and his crude posts, to Donald the rapist, anyone supporting this party while trying to take the moral high ground will forever be known as a clown. These people have no policies, lie through their teeth with absurd claims, and just aren’t serious candidates. This race shouldn’t be close! The same people who are going to vote R are the ones gullible enough to buy the Bible’s, the shoes, the coins, the cards, and believe that kids are leaving for school in the morning as one gender and returning in the afternoon after having gender reassignment surgery! Morons.
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Yes, yes, yes! Morons.
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This is actually a reply to NYC Parent above: you are so right. I would guess that the corporate media bosses are responsible (yet again) for the uber coverage of it45 & any <er/-coverage of Kamala.
l would think that all the “mainstream” (thinking major networks & CNN, MSNBC) media journalists might have some idea that under an it47 dictatorship they will all be in jail or strictly censored.
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It’s not right. Trump and Vance have been doing far more rallies and public appearances than Harris and Walz. There is objective reality outside of media.
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“far more”?
What does that even mean? That article you linked to was not a comprehensive list of all their appearances and rallies.
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From the article flerp! linked to:
“In September, Trump held 21 public campaign events including remarks, rallies, press conferences and town halls. That’s compared to Harris’ 13 campaign events…”
Somehow I doubt that for more than 4 weeks in September, each week Kamala had only 3 “campaign events” over 7 days. She was having multiple events most days, not fewer than 3 “campaign events” every WEEK!
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I assume you can count. Count then numbers for Trump and Vance and the numbers for Harris and Walz.
“In September, Trump held 21 public campaign events including remarks, rallies, press conferences and town halls. That’s compared to Harris’ 13 campaign events; Walz had seven campaign events, according to campaign schedules ABC News has reviewed. On top of Trump’s jam-packed campaign schedule, his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, alone held 14 events in the month of September.”
If you aren’t worried about this, then fine. I am concerned that she needs to be stepping on the gas more. This is neck and neck.
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I am more worried about the fact that Kamala can do 10 campaign events every day and the media will ignore her message and write dozens of articles about how voters don’t trust her and how she is not doing “enough” events. How Kamala is “losing ground” because she is not doing “enough” events. How Kamala is desperate.
Meanwhile, Trump’s unfitness is no longer considered newsworthy — I guess you defend this as fine. Why would the media write every article about Trump highlighting the distrust that voters have in him? It’s not like he’s Biden in 2024!!! Or the 2016 Democrat! Or Kerry or Gore. Somehow, there was NEVER “enough” coverage.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The one thing that has remained constant every time a perfectly competent Democrat loses to an incompetent, unfit, corrupt Republican who would have been destroyed by the media if they were a Democrat is that the folks like you say the same thing. They claim that the negative media articles abut the Democrat and the lack of media coverage of the lies and unfitness of the Republican candidate has absolutely nothing to do with why the vast majority of voters believe it is the DEMOCRAT (and not the Republican) who has major trust issues.
You are the one who believes if the Dem just does something different, the media will stop writing articles about how voters just don’t trust them, how voters have concerns about them, how voters wonder about their truthfulness, how voters believe she isn’t ready.
The only thing Kamala could do to get that negative framing to stop is to turn into a right wing Republican so the media would treat her the way it treats Trump.
It isn’t a coincidence that the Dems lose against the WORST GOP candidates (Dukakis against Bush, Gore and Kerry against GW Bush, the dem running against Trump in 2016) and win when they run against the arguably much better GOP candidates – like Romney, McCain, Dole.
You think Clinton and Obama and (in 2020) Biden did something special in their campaign. They didn’t. The media did something different. They treated Clinton and Obama and 2020 Biden like they were Republicans! Missteps got one or two negative articles and then no more because “the public already knows”. Just like Trump and Vance!
It is obvious that if the Republican candidate is normal, the media doesn’t feel obligated to demonstrate how “fair and balanced” their reporting is by turning the Democrat nominee into an untrustworthy candidate that voters have doubts, concerns, and questions about.
JD Vance has never been asked how voters can trust him when he has lied and flip flopped. Not once. Walz was asked how voters can trust him in the debate – JD Vance was not. Which is ironic since the supposed “lie” that Walz told is not even close to being the non-stop dishonesty of JD Vance.
Stories about the Democrats are about the concerns with their honesty, how voters don’t trust them.
Stories about the Republicans that occasionally bother to quote some lie Trump or Vance says never make the point that what they say makes them untrustworthy. That is reserved only for Democrats.
You are the one who has ignored the danger and defended the NYT writing hundreds of articles whose main point was to amplify the unfitness of Biden, while failing to do the same with Trump.
Your defense is what the so-called liberal media uses. “Voters already know” so we can’t report it anymore.
Your only answer to why so many voters would be drawn to someone as unfit as Trump – a man who has already showed in his first term that he can’t be trusted to do anything at all for those voters (except the anti-abortion religious right) – is that it’s the Democrats’ fault that voters don’t know that Trump is unfit.
Trump should be defeated by the same margin that David Duke was defeated in very conservative Louisiana when he ran for Governor in 1991. But back then the NYT wrote stories on what was WRONG with voters who thought the unfit, racist David Duke was an appealing candidate. Not endless stories about why those voters are so important and how valid their views are.
We have endless stories about what those voters believe, and not one that actually have the voters elaborate on their beliefs.
That’s reserved for The Daily Show. And when they do a better job showing what Trump voters are really like, while the NYT normalizes and makes those voters feel validated in their views, it’s not surprising fascist is nearing.
No one believes that the Democrats are terribly flawed because Trump says it. They believe it because the so-called liberal media is constantly validating that view in every story. Only ONE party has a trust issue in the media, and it’s the Democrats. Despite the fact that there are as many Americans – even more Americans – concerned about Trump’s issues as Kamala’s. That story just is not “newsworthy” as the very huge election issue about the distrust that voters have about Kamala.
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That is a very silly thing to worry about. Doing more campaign events helps candidates make their case and the case against their opponents.
This obsession (not yours alone to be fair) with the idea that some kind of dereliction of duty by mainstream media is responsible for Trump’s success is wrong in its premise: outside of right-wing media, mass media has been extremely harsh on Trump, as any idiot can see. The cries to the contrary are just a refusal to accept the thing that is right in all of our faces face, which is that the biggest reason for Trump’s success is that huge numbers of voters like what he’s selling. They like the authoritarianism. They like the xenophobia. They like the drama and the entertainment. Look at the polling data, a huge number of Hispanic voters (around half) don’t give a crap that you think Trump is racist or nativist. They want a wall built and they don’t find him offensive. Meanwhile you’re getting into weird factual disputes about how many campaign events Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have had, as if you can compile a more authoritative list than the actual campaigns have, and as if this perverse project would make any difference to anyone.
Harris is up against the wall and she needs to be going full-bore from here to November 6. How anyone regardless of their politics could take issue with that statement is beyond me.
I won’t continue to clog up this page by litigating this stupid dispute with you any more, so the floor is yours to eternity.
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I think that there is a lot more to Trump’s success than simply the appeal of the strongman and xenophobia. Many on the left simply do not understand how millions of Americans think. They are deeply religious and horrified by a cultural tide that they feel is about to overwhelm them. TikTok and Instagram are a “player’s culture” in which the way to success is in your face party culture stuff and the pretense that you are on top of that game, however sorrowful and lonely you actually are. Lots of ordinary Americans are angry about that and want Daddy to step in. And unfortunately, he is the only one who professes to fit the bill. They have a vision of a lost America of pioneer values that they desperately want back.
Let me tell you a story. Many years ago an Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb came to study in America. And he was horrified by what he saw here–women in bathing suits and singing and dancing on television. He went back and wrote books about how Western culture was a tidal wave that would completely engulf and destroy Islam, and he called for Jihad to stop this from happening. The whole modern fundamentalist Islamic movement was inspired by him.
Well, much the same thing is happening all across America, and it is being driven by AT LEAST WEEKLY church meetings with passionate speeches given at them about righting the course.
IT IS PRECISELY THE SAME PHENOMENON, and it is powerful and proselytizing and energizing to participants. Look what happened in the Middle East. The same things is happening here. Christian Jihad.
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I don’t disagree with any of that. I was simplifying, and there are surely other causes. I don’t even discount the idea that “media” is a significant factor, although I think the biggest media factor is not the mainstream mass media that so many obsess over (perversely they obsess most over not Fox News or the other right-wing broadcasters, but the NYT, which is consumed almost exclusively by Democrats; it’s not unlike a form of self-flagellation), but rather social media and its algorithms. Twitter is the most pernicious in terms of partisan politics. Social media will be the biggest thing warping Discourse in the future, if it’s not already.
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Of course, Flerp, and I’m sorry if I sounded flippant about your comments. But I live in Florida, home of strip clubs and megachurches. I KNOW how powerful and organized and in a sense underground because isolated in its own sphere the Christian Jihad movement is. Millions and millions of Americans going to these churches every week and hearing this message about how a revolution is needed to “turn us back to god.” Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic did a fascinating study years back on cultural change and how it was driven by fairly small deeply passionate people.
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No, your perspective is valuable and your comment was interesting.
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To be clear, it was interesting because it is the product of actual observation and experience by a thinking person and is not something that has been said and regurgitated a thousand times here and elsewhere.
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Thank you, FLERP. That means a lot to me.
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Once again. Christian Jihad is happening in the United States, and our press has almost entirely missed it. Clueless, for the most part. But this phenomenon is huge. If journalists went to church more often, they would know this. It’s the same phenomenon that started with Qutb and became the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolution and Al-Qaeda and so much more. EXACTLY THE SAME.
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“Doing more campaign events helps candidates make their case and the case against their opponents.”
lol! Kamala has been doing campaign events constantly. And nothing says that you get your news from the NYT more than your apparent belief that Trump makes his case and the case against Kamala at his frequent campaign appearances. That is certainly how the NYT sane-washing reports on his appearances!
If Trump were a Democrat, EVERY appearance he made would be grounds for another big story about how insane and dishonest Trump is! And the growing number of voters who don’t trust him and know he is dangerous.
Since Trump is Trump, every story is a stenography of his remarks, with a disclaimer that partisan Democrats disagree, and lots of coverage about how many male voters love him!
Since Kamala is a Democrat, every appearance is a reason to write about how voters STILL do not trust Kamala.
You still hold yourself out as an expert in media criticism, and disparage scholars of campaign coverage who actually cite evidence. Why the arrogance? If I were claiming I knew more about the law than legal scholars, and spent my time disparaging legal scholars who disagreed with my own uninformed opinion, I would sound just like you.
If Trump got 3 solid weeks where EVERY appearance he made was covered as “Voters don’t trust Trump because of Trump’s lies and racism, and his recent campaign rally RAISED EVEN MORE DOUBTS AND QUESTIONS in voters’ minds about just how much harm the US will suffer because of Trump’s dangerous actions”, this election would be over. You certainly approved of Biden being covered that way!
But since you just said that Trump makes a great case for being president with his rallies, I think you’ve shown your hand, and your biases.
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Bob,
You make many good points. However, never forget that there are many working class and middle class voters who BELIEVE that Trump’s economy was terrific for them and believe that worldwide inflation – where the US is handling it better than most other countries – is Biden’s fault and Trump has some great plan to address it. Despite Trump having no plan for anything!
It’s the economy, except when a Democrat is president, the media ignores the good part of the economy and amplifies the bad. When Trump was president, the media focused only one the good part of the economy (which he inherited from Obama) and ignored that Trump did absolutely nothing for all the people in the midwest who voted for him because they had lost jobs. If it wasn’t for the pandemic, I think Trump would have been characterized by the media as the most economically successful president in history, with voices of folks who were unhappy completely ignored, or portrayed as partisan sour grapes.
This is simply a repeat of everything I saw in 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2016. The so-called liberal media legitimizes every right wing narrative to undermine the Democrat, and the media DE-legitimizes all valid criticism of the Republican as simply partisan sour grapes.
The “issues” that Dukakis, Gore and Kerry lost on were absurd crap. But they were turned into reasons not to trust them.
The “issues” that plague Trump and real and dangerous! and they are never reported as reasons not to trust him.
Go back and look at the debate – Walz was asked “why should voters trust you?” Vance was never asked that question. Journalists think it is “implied” in the questions they ask Republicans and the stories they write about them, but they believe it musty be tjhe explicit focus opf stories they write about the Democrats.
I’m not the only one who noticed the lousy coverage of Trump in the mainstream media.
I don’t understand the folks who seem to believe that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon and 40 years of “the media is so pro-Democrat” propaganda had nothing to do with why the Republicans were able to win elections despite having failed economic policies that most voters actually don’t like.
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