The Roundup
Elon Musk (who else), Trayon White, DCA Plane Crash, Maryland Matters
At some point the wheels are going to come off Elon Musk’s “revolution” (his word, his world). How much wreckage is left behind before we get there is anyone’s guess. Hopefully it’ll be before the US government misses a payment to creditors, which could send tremors through financial markets. We may be headed for that iceberg, with Musk’s deputized twenty-somethings commandeering the backend of the US Treasury payments system, and much more. (I said twenty-somethings, but I mean no disrespect to 19-year-old Edward Coristine, who recently graduated from Rye Country Day School and goes by “Big Balls” online.) Here’s Ryan Grim’s excellent segment on Musk’s coup.
These days the Washington Post’s local coverage isn’t so much problematic as it is nonexistent. So for my local news I turn to other outlets, none more so than Maryland Matters. A few months back I shot a nice note to the outlet’s lead reporter and founder, Josh Kurtz, which led to a funny exchange. The novel spelling of my middle name — Carll with two L’s — prompted Kurtz to ask if I was related to Carll Tucker, his first boss at The Patent Trader, a local newspaper in Westchester, NY. Indeed, that’s my dad. Since then, Kurtz and I have stayed in touch and I look forward to that continuing after Valentine’s Day, when he’ll be stepping back from his labor of love. “I’ll be 63 years old in a couple of months, but there are days when, professionally, I feel like I’m 75 or 80,” Kurtz writes. Having built an award-winning newsroom — and done so in the face of headwinds shuttering local newspapers at a historic clip (including The Patent Trader) — he’s deserving of a break.
I know I just said the Post’s local coverage is increasingly nonexistent, but there are exceptions, like a recent story on Trayon White, who on Tuesday became the first councilmember to be expelled from the DC Council. Even as White faces federal corruption charges, he remains eligible to run in a special election to fill his seat. “I think he’d win overwhelmingly — by a larger margin than he did before,” pollster Ron Lester told the Post. “People want to be able to choose their own council member. They don’t want the council to overstep their bounds.” The Post’s story was unusual in that it brought forward voices in Ward 8 without the paper’s usual condescension.
Back in August, I wrote about the troubling context in which White’s prosecution is taking place — namely that it’s always Black DC officials with strong Black support who get targeted by the feds. Meanwhile, Jack Evans — a white and infinitely more corrupt former councilmember — is still being paid by DC taxpayers, only now indirectly as a contractor pushing yet another taxpayer-funded stadium. I’m not excusing White’s actions, but the contrast ain’t pretty.
In my nearly twenty years in and around DC, I feel like there’s been a serious uptick in helicopter flights hovering above — and not that high above, the choppers fly quite low. Of course I’m mentioning this in light of the 67 people killed when a plane attempting to land at DC National Airport collided with a military helicopter. The helicopter, which may have been the offending party, was on a training mission. Even crazier than conducting military training alongside a busy airport, is to be doing so in order to ferry VIPs around in a high-end “taxi service,” as the Wall Street Journal described the program. I mean, if anyone deserves to be stuck in DC traffic, it’s our top military brass, who couldn’t even defeat the hapless Taliban. Maybe if these geniuses were stuck in traffic with the rest of us, they’d reconsider spending endless billions on regime change and advocate for pumping some of that public money into our public transportation so they (and the rest of us) can actually get around.
We end where we began, with my favorite journalist Ryan Grim. Here he discusses how the chickens are coming home to roost for Democrats, as a result of having hitched our wagon to the corporate media. While corporate outlets were eager to challenge Trump in his first term, thinking he was a fluke, now that Trump is here to stay, they’re racing to throw millions of dollars at him — less charitably known as bribes — leaving Democrats without an effective messaging system.
With two l's? That's weird!