James Stewart in the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
Now he tells us. In a recent podcast with Ezra Klein of The New York Times, former Graham Platner political strategist Morris Katz admits the obvious: that it shouldn’t have taken a credible accusation of rape to force Platner out of the race. Katz says:
In hindsight, knowing what we know now, the Reddit posts alone probably should have been enough — or should have been enough. The tattoo should have been enough. The initial New York Times story on troubling behavior should have been enough.
That being said, it appears that Maine Democrats have settled on a strong alternative in Troy Jackson, who is leading the Republican incumbent, Susan Collins, in some polls. (By the way: Another former Platner consultant, Daniel Moraff, also faces accusations of sexual assault, reports progressive independent journalist Marisa Kabas. What a train wreck.)
Bill Siroty was an early supporter of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. Photo (cc) 2003 by Elvert Barnes.
Bill Siroty, a New Hampshire political activist who died Sunday at 75, was one of the original political bloggers. I profiled him for The Boston Phoenix in November 2003 to find out how he’d turned his daily newsletter, New Hampshire News Links, into an influential outlet for political news ahead of that state’s presidential primary.
Paging through this 22-year-old story is like reliving the early days of the internet. There’s Chuck Todd, then with “Hotline,” now the retired moderator of NBC’s “Meet the Press.” There’s James Pindell, then with PoliticsNH.com, now with The Boston Globe. There’s Deborah “Arnie” Arnesen, still a force on New Hampshire talk radio. And there’s Josh Marshall, still blogging at his Talking Points Memo site. This was all before social media, which has distorted politics — and the media — beyond recognition.
My condolences to Bill’s friends and family, including his husband, Bill Stelling.
An unlikely bigfoot
Meet Dr. Bill Siroty: Physician, Dean supporter, and New Hampshire’s indispensable media activist
The Boston Phoenix | Nov. 7, 2003
NASHUA, N.H. — The doctor sitting across the table from me in the Southern New Hampshire Medical Center cafeteria, sipping iced coffee late on a Friday morning, would not be on anyone’s list of media stars in this state’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary.
William Siroty, a mild-mannered 52-year-old allergist and internist, doesn’t write about politics, analyze poll numbers, or blurt out pithy sound bites on TV talk shows. He speaks so softly that I have to ask him to repeat himself whenever a can goes clunk! in the soda machine behind me.
Fintan O’Toole’s review in The New York Times of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” includes a perfect summation of the fundamental challenge to journalism in the Age of Trump:
The profession is shaped by an assumption that has been around at least since the Greek tragedians: Revelation is followed by reversal. When Oedipus’ (or Richard Nixon’s) crimes are exposed, he must fall from power. But not so Trump. With a few notable exceptions, he relies on a collective shrug of indifference from those in his support system, and defies exposure. What can journalists do in a world where there is no shame and, apparently, no consequence?
It calls to mind then-Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron’s well-known response to a question about whether the Post was at war with Trump. “We’re not at war with the administration, we’re at work,” he replied — a succinct statement of how journalists should approach their coverage.
The closing paragraphs of The New York Times’ report on Graham Platner’s sexting-while-married problem are, uh, interesting.
The Democratic Senate candidate from Maine was speaking at an event in April, shortly after Gov. Janet Mills had dropped out, when he was asked a perfectly logical question: Other than the Nazi tattoo and the offensive social-media posts, is there anything else we should know? Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer write:
Toward the end of a town hall meeting in Sabattus, Maine, in April, the night before Ms. Mills dropped out, a Platner supporter named Carolyn Greeley asked him a blunt question.
“Is there anything you need to share with us?” she asked.
Ms. Greeley was bothered by his past comments about women, she said, and wanted assurances that there would not be more damaging revelations to come.
Mr. Platner was unequivocal in his response. Republicans would certainly “make stuff up” about him, he said. He had dated, had girlfriends, “gone through life.” But everything had already been “dragged up,” he promised the crowd.
“In my past, there is not some big, dark secret,” he said.
Asked in an interview how he could be so certain that there was no other information that would come out about him after the event, Mr. Platner was terse.
“I lived my life,” he said. “That’s how.”
We now know not just about the sexting but that Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, had warned a campaign official about it just as the campaign was getting under way. In other words, Platner failed to tell Greeley the truth, and it’s pretty hard to imagine that he’d forgotten about the sexting.
Meanwhile, Michael Shepherd reports (sub. req.) in the Bangor Daily News that a Platner adviser “warned a former aide she would be accused of lying and sabotage if she cooperated with news outlets reporting on sexually explicit messages Platner sent to women.”
The former aide, an ex-state legislator named Genevieve McDonald, went to The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times anyway.
The blood is really in the water now, and you can be sure that news outlets are scrambling to get ahead of whatever might be coming next. And it is absolutely incredible that Maine’s now-she’s-Trumper-now-she-isn’t Republican senator, Susan Collins, may be on the verge of getting another free ride.
Barney Frank. Photo (cc) 2012 by U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The devolution of our political culture is perhaps best summed up in this passage from David Shribman’s Boston Globe obituary of Barney Frank, the legendary progressive congressman who died Tuesday evening:
Mr. Frank was involved in two bailout efforts to battle the 2008 economic crisis, first for foundering financial services institutions and then for the nation’s automobile companies.
“If Barney had not been chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during the financial crisis, I shudder to think what would have happened to our economy,” said Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs who served as President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary during the meltdown. “He was in the right spot at the right time.”
Now we are dealing with what looks a lot like a tech bubble plus mounting economic pressures from Donald Trump’s illegal war against Iran — and there isn’t a Barney Frank in sight.
I also found this Shribman sentence particularly graceful:
Through more than a half-century of political activism, political agitation, political campaigning, and political maneuvering, his presence on the left in Massachusetts politics exceeded the combined left field tenure of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski in Fenway Park.
Today Frank is probably best known as the first member of Congress to come out as gay voluntarily. But there was a lot more to his career than that. His work stretched back many decades, and it was consequential.
I’m old enough to remember when Frank was a top aide to Boston Mayor Kevin White and, later, a member of the state legislature. He was elected to Congress for the first time in 1980, when he succeeded Father Robert Drinan, himself a progressive legend. Two years later, he defeated moderate Republican Margaret Heckler in a battle of incumbent House members, a situation forced by reapportionment. He continued to serve until 2013, when he was succeeded by Joe Kennedy III.
I think I only interviewed Frank once, briefly, while I was at The Boston Phoenix. Frank was notoriously abrupt with reporters, so I tried to steel myself — but he must have been in a good mood that day. What I remember is that I’d asked for his thoughts on a story I was writing, and he called me back from outside a committee hearing. I’m paraphrasing, but he began something like this: A Democrat’s talking, so I’ve got a few minutes. I only have to pay attention when it’s a Republican.
Like Hillary and Bernie in 2016, or Grady Little’s decision to send Pedro Martinez back out for the eighth, the media’s coverage of Joe Biden’s decline in 2024 is going to be litigated forever.
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The latest example came Friday night on the “PBS NewsHour,” when Geoff Bennett asked Jonathan Capehart why coverage of Donald Trump’s mental state hasn’t matched similar coverage of Biden’s decline two years ago. Here’s how it went down:
Public domain Illustration of Jeffrey Epstein, left, and Donald Trump by Michael Gode.
The Jeffrey Epstein story is getting weirder, more disturbing and is moving ever closer to Donald Trump. The latest details come from Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who has done more to expose Epstein’s depravity than any other journalist.
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Brown’s latest comes in the form of two articles. The first, published on Friday, advances earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and NPR that the Justice Department had withheld some of the Epstein files regarding a woman who told the FBI that Trump sexually assaulted her around 1983, when she was about 13 years old. Those files have now been produced. Brown writes that in one of the interviews:
She said he unzipped his pants and forced her head to his penis. She said she immediately bit him and Trump struck her, the report said. She told the FBI agents that she bit him because he “disgusted” her.
In a follow-up interview, she said that after she rebuffed him, he “pulled her hair and punched her on the side of the head.”
Bystander video shared with The New York Times shows Jeffrey Pretti holding his phone as he’s taken down by federal agents.
The New York Times has produced another visual analysis (gift link) of a fatal shooting in Minneapolis by federal agents.
As with Renee Good on Jan. 7, the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti appears to be entirely unjustified. Preliminary statements from government officials that Pretti was approaching agents with a gun were false. If they didn’t know what they were saying was untrue at the time, they knew shortly thereafter.
Based on what we’ve learned, Pretti, a registered nurse, was video-recording agents while walking toward them as they went about their business of terrorizing the populace. An agent pepper-sprayed a woman, and Pretti got between her and the agent in an attempt to shield her. He was holding up his phone with one hand; his other hand was empty.
Agents then pepper-sprayed him and took him to the pavement. At that point, an agent took Pretti’s handgun and walked away. In Minnesota it is legal to carry a gun in public, and Pretti had a valid license. Again, he had not touched his gun; rather, an agent saw it and removed it from him.
Then, with Pretti’s gun removed and down on the pavement, agents began shooting him, firing 10 shots. It has all the appearances of the deliberate execution of an unarmed man — an act of state-sponsored terrorism. By the time Stephen Miller took to Twitter/X on Saturday afternoon and posted, “An assassin tried to murder federal agents,” he knew he was lying.
If you’re looking to catch up, Heather Cox Richardson has pulled together all the various strands, including efforts by Minnesota state investigators to preserve the crime scene and a letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz that can only be described as attempted extortion.
Minneapolis is under siege. And if you’re thinking, well, that’s just one city, I’ll close by paraphrasing a quote that is often attributed to the science-fiction writer William Gibson: Fascism has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Update: A little after 2:30 p.m., I changed the headline from “suggests that Alex Pretti was executed” to “shows that Alex Pretti was executed.” As the hours go by, the truth of what happened is becoming clearer. The Times itself is now asserting, “Videos directly contradict descriptions of the encounter by administration officials.”
Correction: Updated to correct Alex Pretti’s name.
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ICE agents in South Minneapolis on Monday. Photo (cc) 2026 by Nicole Neri / Minnesota Reformer.
I posted this on Facebook earlier today, and it’s gotten a lot of interaction, with nearly 100 comments so far. Feel free to comment here, but if you’d like to join the conversation on Facebook, here’s the link.
I’ve seen a few people of good will argue that we should withhold judgment on ICE agent Jonathan Ross’ killing of Renee Good until the investigation is complete. I’m sorry, no. We know exactly what happened, from multiple angles. Every new video only makes Ross’ actions look more outrageous. And, of course, the feds are already impeding any legitimate investigation.
Public anger diminishes with every day that passes, and then we’re on to the next thing. (Invasion of Greenland, anyone?) There are no ambiguities. We know what happened. Ross should be arrested and charged with murder. Then there really will be an investigation, and we can let a jury of his peers decide his fate.
With Donald Trump and JD Vance cheering on as their armed thugs terrorize American cities, you might think this is not the optimal time for revisiting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 comment about consigning half of Donald Trump’s supporters to a “basket of deplorables.”
Yet according to Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, the attitude that underlies Clinton’s statement has a lot to do with where we find ourselves today. Sandel argues that we are reaping the whirlwind of meritocracy. That ideology, closely associated with neoliberalism and free trade, shaped much of the post-World War II era, especially starting in the 1980s. It ended in the Trump-led populist revolt in the U.S., the Brexit vote in the U.K., and the rightward turn of other liberal democracies in Europe and elsewhere.
Meritocracy, Sandel writes, has led to the mistaken belief among elites that they deserve the wealth and prestige that have been bestowed upon them, and that those left behind deserve their lot in life as well. Moreover, the left-behind believe it, too. In a more formally hierarchical society, like an aristocracy, everyone knows the game is rigged. Thus those at the top understand that their privileged position is an accident of birth, while those at the bottom are able to hang on to some semblance of self-esteem. By contrast, if they have been sorted out as meritocracy’s “losers,” they have been taught to believe they have no one to blame but themselves.
