Michael Boyle's weblog
Crowds in hundreds of cities around the world gathered Saturday in conjunction with the Women’s March on Washington.
Source: Pictures From Women’s Marches Around the World – The New York Times
Including photos from Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver among many other cities both in North America and abroad.
From Montreal:
NYTCREDIT: Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press
Here’s an article with some great photos from a large march in Ottawa today as well.
[Spicer] said: “This was the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, both in person and around the globe.”
This, along with much else Spicer said, was plainly untrue. But there’s a strategy at work here. The Trump administration is creating a baseline expectation among its loyalists that they can’t trust anything said by the media. The spat over crowd size is a low-stakes, semi-comic dispute, but the groundwork is being laid for much more consequential debates over what is, and isn’t, true.
Source: Trump’s real war isn’t with the media. It’s with facts. – Vox
The Trump Administration is trying to spin the sparse turnout using classic “Big Lie” techniques. Ezra takes a deeper look, complete with links to reliable data sources and further analysis.
Critics should also focus on attacking Mr. Trump’s positions on their merits, not on his rhetoric. Take the threat he poses seriously, but don’t exaggerate it. Each and every Trump pronouncement is not one step closer to the end of the world.Above all, don’t respond intemperately. The President’s shock tactics encourage both followers and opponents to go overboard. But there is no victory in retaliating in a similar fashion, or in becoming enraged by his calculated hypocrisies and lies, which are only meant to provoke.
Source: Globe editorial: Keep calm and carry on, world – The Globe and Mail
Real crises need real solutions. They can’t be resolved with a killer tweet, or by having your friends in the F.B.I. or the Kremlin feed the media stories that take your problems off the front page. What the situation demands are knowledgeable, levelheaded people in positions of authority.
But as far as we know, almost no people meeting that description will be in the new administration, except possibly the nominee for defense secretary — whose nickname just happens to be “Mad Dog.”
Source: Donald the Unready – The New York Times
When the best of the bunch (of Trump’s Cabinet appointments) is named “Mad Dog”… there might be a problem. Just sayin’…
From Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo:
And yet here we have the opportunity to be its guardians and protectors at a unique moment, perhaps a moment of especial peril. Who would not embrace that challenge? We know the curse: may you live in interesting times. We are living in interesting times. Most of us would not have chosen it. But we have it. I think many of us look back at critical momentous moments in our history, the Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and other comparable passages in the country’s history and think, what would I have done? Where would I have been? Well, now’s your moment to find out. We are living in interesting times. We should embrace it rather than feel afraid or powerless. We have a fabric of 240 years of republican government behind us. We have the tools we need.
