Santoria appears to have “loaned” himself $700k from a “corporation” headquartered in Melbourne, Flo Rida. Over/under on whether there’s any 3-6 degrees of separation from Deathsantis?
Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.
They didn't lose the house by this one race though...
I know. But they lost a few more there that they likely assumed they'd win just because it's NY
Plus people always die and retire so if the margin was tad closer, that could be huge.
GOP has a four seat cushion in the House and they flipped four dem seats in the NYC suburbs, two of which on the island.
Yeah? As I said, that is a razor thin cushion. 3 would've been even slimmer, making things even more difficult for the GOP. I think the Dems took NY for granted. Big mistake.
I could have told them they were taking my district for granted, but they didn't ask me. There's a lot of that element in parts of my district covering the east part of queens and long island
Political malpractice. Shame on the media too.
I don't know what was going on there, but there are at least three community newspapers in that district and as someone who flips through them weekly I never saw anything.
Guess you didn't flip through the right one? But it really speaks to the bigger issue of what is happening to those small-town community newspapers and what they report on. Its not by chance but it'd be interesting to know who or what owns those three newspapers that you flipped through. There may very well be a plausible explanation as to why this story didn't get reported in the "lame stream" media.
Before the election, the North Shore Leader on Long Island raised multiple questions about the GOP House candidate. He was elected and is now under investigation for misrepresenting his background to voters.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s possible that theLeader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.
They didn't lose the house by this one race though...
I know. But they lost a few more there that they likely assumed they'd win just because it's NY
Plus people always die and retire so if the margin was tad closer, that could be huge.
GOP has a four seat cushion in the House and they flipped four dem seats in the NYC suburbs, two of which on the island.
Yeah? As I said, that is a razor thin cushion. 3 would've been even slimmer, making things even more difficult for the GOP. I think the Dems took NY for granted. Big mistake.
I could have told them they were taking my district for granted, but they didn't ask me. There's a lot of that element in parts of my district covering the east part of queens and long island
Political malpractice. Shame on the media too.
I don't know what was going on there, but there are at least three community newspapers in that district and as someone who flips through them weekly I never saw anything.
Guess you didn't flip through the right one? But it really speaks to the bigger issue of what is happening to those small-town community newspapers and what they report on. Its not by chance but it'd be interesting to know who or what owns those three newspapers that you flipped through. There may very well be a plausible explanation as to why this story didn't get reported in the "lame stream" media.
Before the election, the North Shore Leader on Long Island raised multiple questions about the GOP House candidate. He was elected and is now under investigation for misrepresenting his background to voters.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s possible that theLeader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
That one I didn't see, the Post has a good point usually something like that gets aggregated into a larger media outlet's story. Too bad it didn't in this case.
Reading 2004
Albany 2006 Camden 2006 E. Rutherford 2, 2006 Inglewood 2006,
Chicago 2007
Camden 2008 MSG 2008 MSG 2008 Hartford 2008.
Seattle 2009 Seattle 2009 Philadelphia 2009,Philadelphia 2009 Philadelphia 2009
Hartford 2010 MSG 2010 MSG 2010
Toronto 2011,Toronto 2011
Wrigley Field 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Philadelphia 2, 2013
Philadelphia 1, 2016 Philadelphia 2 2016 New York 2016 New York 2016 Fenway 1, 2016 Fenway 2, 2018 MSG 2022 St. Paul, 1, St. Paul 2 2023 MSG 2024, MSG 2024 Philadelphia 2024
"I play good, hard-nosed basketball.
Things happen in the game. Nothing you
can do. I don't go and say,
"I'm gonna beat this guy up."
Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.
They didn't lose the house by this one race though...
I know. But they lost a few more there that they likely assumed they'd win just because it's NY
Plus people always die and retire so if the margin was tad closer, that could be huge.
GOP has a four seat cushion in the House and they flipped four dem seats in the NYC suburbs, two of which on the island.
Yeah? As I said, that is a razor thin cushion. 3 would've been even slimmer, making things even more difficult for the GOP. I think the Dems took NY for granted. Big mistake.
I could have told them they were taking my district for granted, but they didn't ask me. There's a lot of that element in parts of my district covering the east part of queens and long island
Political malpractice. Shame on the media too.
I don't know what was going on there, but there are at least three community newspapers in that district and as someone who flips through them weekly I never saw anything.
Guess you didn't flip through the right one? But it really speaks to the bigger issue of what is happening to those small-town community newspapers and what they report on. Its not by chance but it'd be interesting to know who or what owns those three newspapers that you flipped through. There may very well be a plausible explanation as to why this story didn't get reported in the "lame stream" media.
Before the election, the North Shore Leader on Long Island raised multiple questions about the GOP House candidate. He was elected and is now under investigation for misrepresenting his background to voters.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s possible that theLeader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
That one I didn't see, the Post has a good point usually something like that gets aggregated into a larger media outlet's story. Too bad it didn't in this case.
The Post is owned by Rupert Murdick. Why would he want to run that story? Maybe he’s even behind the funding of Santoria? This may be an example of repub millionaires and billionaires who have maxed out their campaign contributions or don’t want to be exposed. What do they do? Buy media outlets and either intentionally run them into the ground to eliminate oversight or control the message, and thus the influence. This POS was one of 435. Imagine if they ran 100 or 200 of 435? How much influence does that get someone, whether for their business interests or ideology (think Koch brothers, it’s not enough in a lifetime to become a billionaire so now you need to remake society to your ideology)? And a mere $700K investment to boot.
Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.
They didn't lose the house by this one race though...
I know. But they lost a few more there that they likely assumed they'd win just because it's NY
Plus people always die and retire so if the margin was tad closer, that could be huge.
GOP has a four seat cushion in the House and they flipped four dem seats in the NYC suburbs, two of which on the island.
Yeah? As I said, that is a razor thin cushion. 3 would've been even slimmer, making things even more difficult for the GOP. I think the Dems took NY for granted. Big mistake.
I could have told them they were taking my district for granted, but they didn't ask me. There's a lot of that element in parts of my district covering the east part of queens and long island
Political malpractice. Shame on the media too.
I don't know what was going on there, but there are at least three community newspapers in that district and as someone who flips through them weekly I never saw anything.
Guess you didn't flip through the right one? But it really speaks to the bigger issue of what is happening to those small-town community newspapers and what they report on. Its not by chance but it'd be interesting to know who or what owns those three newspapers that you flipped through. There may very well be a plausible explanation as to why this story didn't get reported in the "lame stream" media.
Before the election, the North Shore Leader on Long Island raised multiple questions about the GOP House candidate. He was elected and is now under investigation for misrepresenting his background to voters.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s possible that theLeader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
That one I didn't see, the Post has a good point usually something like that gets aggregated into a larger media outlet's story. Too bad it didn't in this case.
The Post is owned by Rupert Murdick. Why would he want to run that story? Maybe he’s even behind the funding of Santoria? This may be an example of repub millionaires and billionaires who have maxed out their campaign contributions or don’t want to be exposed. What do they do? Buy media outlets and either intentionally run them into the ground to eliminate oversight or control the message, and thus the influence. This POS was one of 435. Imagine if they ran 100 or 200 of 435? How much influence does that get someone, whether for their business interests or ideology (think Koch brothers, it’s not enough in a lifetime to become a billionaire so now you need to remake society to your ideology)? And a mere $700K investment to boot.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.
They didn't lose the house by this one race though...
I know. But they lost a few more there that they likely assumed they'd win just because it's NY
Plus people always die and retire so if the margin was tad closer, that could be huge.
GOP has a four seat cushion in the House and they flipped four dem seats in the NYC suburbs, two of which on the island.
Yeah? As I said, that is a razor thin cushion. 3 would've been even slimmer, making things even more difficult for the GOP. I think the Dems took NY for granted. Big mistake.
I could have told them they were taking my district for granted, but they didn't ask me. There's a lot of that element in parts of my district covering the east part of queens and long island
Political malpractice. Shame on the media too.
I don't know what was going on there, but there are at least three community newspapers in that district and as someone who flips through them weekly I never saw anything.
Guess you didn't flip through the right one? But it really speaks to the bigger issue of what is happening to those small-town community newspapers and what they report on. Its not by chance but it'd be interesting to know who or what owns those three newspapers that you flipped through. There may very well be a plausible explanation as to why this story didn't get reported in the "lame stream" media.
Before the election, the North Shore Leader on Long Island raised multiple questions about the GOP House candidate. He was elected and is now under investigation for misrepresenting his background to voters.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s possible that theLeader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
That one I didn't see, the Post has a good point usually something like that gets aggregated into a larger media outlet's story. Too bad it didn't in this case.
The Post is owned by Rupert Murdick. Why would he want to run that story? Maybe he’s even behind the funding of Santoria? This may be an example of repub millionaires and billionaires who have maxed out their campaign contributions or don’t want to be exposed. What do they do? Buy media outlets and either intentionally run them into the ground to eliminate oversight or control the message, and thus the influence. This POS was one of 435. Imagine if they ran 100 or 200 of 435? How much influence does that get someone, whether for their business interests or ideology (think Koch brothers, it’s not enough in a lifetime to become a billionaire so now you need to remake society to your ideology)? And a mere $700K investment to boo
Reading 2004
Albany 2006 Camden 2006 E. Rutherford 2, 2006 Inglewood 2006,
Chicago 2007
Camden 2008 MSG 2008 MSG 2008 Hartford 2008.
Seattle 2009 Seattle 2009 Philadelphia 2009,Philadelphia 2009 Philadelphia 2009
Hartford 2010 MSG 2010 MSG 2010
Toronto 2011,Toronto 2011
Wrigley Field 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Philadelphia 2, 2013
Philadelphia 1, 2016 Philadelphia 2 2016 New York 2016 New York 2016 Fenway 1, 2016 Fenway 2, 2018 MSG 2022 St. Paul, 1, St. Paul 2 2023 MSG 2024, MSG 2024 Philadelphia 2024
"I play good, hard-nosed basketball.
Things happen in the game. Nothing you
can do. I don't go and say,
"I'm gonna beat this guy up."
oops hit the post button without typing anything, at this point I expect someone to uncover he claimed to be work for Vandelay industries.
Reading 2004
Albany 2006 Camden 2006 E. Rutherford 2, 2006 Inglewood 2006,
Chicago 2007
Camden 2008 MSG 2008 MSG 2008 Hartford 2008.
Seattle 2009 Seattle 2009 Philadelphia 2009,Philadelphia 2009 Philadelphia 2009
Hartford 2010 MSG 2010 MSG 2010
Toronto 2011,Toronto 2011
Wrigley Field 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Philadelphia 2, 2013
Philadelphia 1, 2016 Philadelphia 2 2016 New York 2016 New York 2016 Fenway 1, 2016 Fenway 2, 2018 MSG 2022 St. Paul, 1, St. Paul 2 2023 MSG 2024, MSG 2024 Philadelphia 2024
"I play good, hard-nosed basketball.
Things happen in the game. Nothing you
can do. I don't go and say,
"I'm gonna beat this guy up."
Real tough, tough guy that Deathsantis. Going after those corrupt, dangerous, addictive and grooming affairs otherwise known as drag shows. Tough guy that Deathsantis. Can’t wait for him to be POTUS.
The abortion part has me puzzled it states they want to protect anti abortion churches and such from attacks! I might be missing the news on this but can anyone point to when these crimes have occurred? I always hear about crimes at PPH facility and abortion clinics! Scalise is such a dick! God I hate all of the GOP party
Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.
They didn't lose the house by this one race though...
I know. But they lost a few more there that they likely assumed they'd win just because it's NY
Plus people always die and retire so if the margin was tad closer, that could be huge.
GOP has a four seat cushion in the House and they flipped four dem seats in the NYC suburbs, two of which on the island.
Yeah? As I said, that is a razor thin cushion. 3 would've been even slimmer, making things even more difficult for the GOP. I think the Dems took NY for granted. Big mistake.
I could have told them they were taking my district for granted, but they didn't ask me. There's a lot of that element in parts of my district covering the east part of queens and long island
Political malpractice. Shame on the media too.
I don't know what was going on there, but there are at least three community newspapers in that district and as someone who flips through them weekly I never saw anything.
Guess you didn't flip through the right one? But it really speaks to the bigger issue of what is happening to those small-town community newspapers and what they report on. Its not by chance but it'd be interesting to know who or what owns those three newspapers that you flipped through. There may very well be a plausible explanation as to why this story didn't get reported in the "lame stream" media.
Before the election, the North Shore Leader on Long Island raised multiple questions about the GOP House candidate. He was elected and is now under investigation for misrepresenting his background to voters.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s possible that theLeader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
This is a great find, but honestly the medias problem has nothing to do with disappearing newspapers. The conclusion in the above story is awful. Elections are won and lost over a tiny story, and the House flipped specifically on blue seats lost in the NY suburbs based mostly on one issue that was discussed here in NY non stop during election season, the bail reform originally enacted by Hochul.
For all the billions and billions spent by CNN NBC MSNBC (and we could lump the times and post as well) they spend comparatively little to zero time devoted to this issue, and almost all their politics time was devoted to ridiculing trump, which had been proven to have diminishing effectiveness even in this former blue region. Which coincidently, had not elected a Republican since 1998, before Steve Israel’s first term.
Yet CNN, times and post are still going on and on about trump, even after losing the House in districts that have been democratic since Clinton and Lewinsky. Big media spends billions yet is unable to answer basic questions such as which districts are actually swing and what are the important issues there. Instead it’s non stop trump and j six. Those are stories, but cmon, you have 24 hours of tv schedules and huge web sites and papers to fill, do your job.
The question should be, if the Leader was so convinced Santos was a fraud, why did they not make common sense moves like broadcasting this story on social media (ITS FREE) targeting the largest of the left media, such as CNN or MSNBC? They couldn’t get any airtime on the major cable networks with a claim of massive fraud during the campaign season? Couldn’t find a way to have a cup of coffee with morning Joe? Not sure what any of this has to do with decline of newspapers. They could have used tools available today to forward their story. They chose not to, thats the story here.
Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.
They didn't lose the house by this one race though...
I know. But they lost a few more there that they likely assumed they'd win just because it's NY
Plus people always die and retire so if the margin was tad closer, that could be huge.
GOP has a four seat cushion in the House and they flipped four dem seats in the NYC suburbs, two of which on the island.
Yeah? As I said, that is a razor thin cushion. 3 would've been even slimmer, making things even more difficult for the GOP. I think the Dems took NY for granted. Big mistake.
I could have told them they were taking my district for granted, but they didn't ask me. There's a lot of that element in parts of my district covering the east part of queens and long island
Political malpractice. Shame on the media too.
I don't know what was going on there, but there are at least three community newspapers in that district and as someone who flips through them weekly I never saw anything.
Guess you didn't flip through the right one? But it really speaks to the bigger issue of what is happening to those small-town community newspapers and what they report on. Its not by chance but it'd be interesting to know who or what owns those three newspapers that you flipped through. There may very well be a plausible explanation as to why this story didn't get reported in the "lame stream" media.
Before the election, the North Shore Leader on Long Island raised multiple questions about the GOP House candidate. He was elected and is now under investigation for misrepresenting his background to voters.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s possible that theLeader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
This is a great find, but honestly the medias problem has nothing to do with disappearing newspapers. The conclusion in the above story is awful. Elections are won and lost over a tiny story, and the House flipped specifically on blue seats lost in the NY suburbs based mostly on one issue that was discussed here in NY non stop during election season, the bail reform originally enacted by Hochul.
For all the billions and billions spent by CNN NBC MSNBC (and we could lump the times and post as well) they spend comparatively little to zero time devoted to this issue, and almost all their politics time was devoted to ridiculing trump, which had been proven to have diminishing effectiveness even in this former blue region. Which coincidently, had not elected a Republican since 1998, before Steve Israel’s first term.
Yet CNN, times and post are still going on and on about trump, even after losing the House in districts that have been democratic since Clinton and Lewinsky. Big media spends billions yet is unable to answer basic questions such as which districts are actually swing and what are the important issues there. Instead it’s non stop trump and j six. Those are stories, but cmon, you have 24 hours of tv schedules and huge web sites and papers to fill, do your job.
The question should be, if the Leader was so convinced Santos was a fraud, why did they not make common sense moves like broadcasting this story on social media (ITS FREE) targeting the largest of the left media, such as CNN or MSNBC? They couldn’t get any airtime on the major cable networks with a claim of massive fraud during the campaign season? Couldn’t find a way to have a cup of coffee with morning Joe? Not sure what any of this has to do with decline of newspapers. They could have used tools available today to forward their story. They chose not to, thats the story here.
Most of the staff is part-time with other jobs or is comprised of students and retirees. Makes me think that they didn’t have a digital media professional on staff, which are key and true professionals (it’s why campaigns hire one and major celebrities sometimes as well). It’s not as easy as giving Granny Smith or Brock Jock a smart phone and a twatter account. They also don’t have the deep pockets to absorb the costs of a thorough investigation nor a potential defamation lawsuit.
Major media outlets that you mentioned are national/worldwide media outlets. They’re interested in the big stories that will resonate from Maine to California (Gabby Petito or Moscow, ID) and not one of 435 congressional districts that’s been safely dem for decades. Also, small time or town media outlets don’t have access to those corporate boardrooms or CEOs of those media outlets that you listed.
The real story is the GOP fraud party and their willingness to accept fraudulent candidates, From POOTWH to Santaria, to gain and maintain power and drive us to authoritarianism.
the take away from this is Americans arent holding GOP feet to the fire this because it is EXPECTED that their GOP and its candidates ARE LIARS AND WILL ALWAYS LIE OR OVERLOOK LIES. That job now falls to the Dems and For Profit Media top correct etc.......
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
the take away from this is Americans arent holding GOP feet to the fire this because it is EXPECTED that their GOP and its candidates ARE LIARS AND WILL ALWAYS LIE OR OVERLOOK LIES. That job now falls to the Dems and For Profit Media top correct etc.......
Seems more a reflection of GOP voters. And it’s their responsibility to clean up their mess. What a country.
So Dems and their aligned media have to do it all? I’m not buying that. If that’s the “solution,” turn out the lights.
the take away from this is Americans arent holding GOP feet to the fire this because it is EXPECTED that their GOP and its candidates ARE LIARS AND WILL ALWAYS LIE OR OVERLOOK LIES. That job now falls to the Dems and For Profit Media top correct etc.......
Seems more a reflection of GOP voters. And it’s their responsibility to clean up their mess. What a country.
So Dems and their aligned media have to do it all? I’m not buying that. If that’s the “solution,” turn out the lights.
Have to? no, imo they shouldn't have to. But need to in light of gop failure? Media should on spec cuz isnt that what they are supposed to do?
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
the take away from this is Americans arent holding GOP feet to the fire this because it is EXPECTED that their GOP and its candidates ARE LIARS AND WILL ALWAYS LIE OR OVERLOOK LIES. That job now falls to the Dems and For Profit Media top correct etc.......
Seems more a reflection of GOP voters. And it’s their responsibility to clean up their mess. What a country.
So Dems and their aligned media have to do it all? I’m not buying that. If that’s the “solution,” turn out the lights.
Have to? no, imo they shouldn't have to. But need to in light of gop failure? Media should on spec cuz isnt that what they are supposed to do?
have you watched that video?
I did and I don’t agree with it. The dems shouldn’t be expected to lead, legislate and babysit the repubs. If that’s the case, democracy is broken because its citizenry prefers it that way.
I could counter that the dems just need to stoop to the repub fraud level and if they’re going to accuse dems of all of these evil things they’re supposedly doing, the dems might as well do them. It doesn’t make sense, just as Bo’s thought doesn’t make sense.
Are dems and the lame stream media supposed to audit repubs campaign financing, as an example? The voters of Missouri rewarded him. Same in the state of Tejas with their fraud AG. Madness.
Will
Kevin McCarthy become the next speaker of the House?
(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Hold
on to your hats and sunglasses, folks. There’s a cyclone of crazy
swirling among the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. As
they sit precariously perched on the precipice of a very
narrow majority, we can expect more fireworks than on New Year’s Eve.
And while this show promises to be just as loud, it’s likely to be a lot
less pretty.
There was a time not that long ago (most of
the last 100 years, give or take) when Republicans were considered the
party of discipline and Democrats the party of “circular firing squads,”
civil wars, or whatever other synonym for dysfunction was preferred.
These stereotypes were unfair only insofar as they were a bit of an
exaggeration, but they were based on some kernels of truth.
As
far back as the 1920s and '30s, the humorist Will Rogers made a living
commenting on Democratic disunity. He famously quipped, “I’m not a
member of any organized political party … I’m a Democrat.” And
“Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If
they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.” His quotes have
been referenced time and again by political reporters in more recent
decades, too.
We can point to a lot of reasons for the
dysfunction. Democrats have become a "big tent" party, and big tents are
held up with a lot of different poles. A bigger tent makes room for
more religions, races, and social identities, which can bring competing
ideologies but certainly different lived experiences and personal
perspectives. Democrats are also more liberal and thus challenge the
status quo, while conservatives try to preserve it.
We could go on
and on — entire political science careers have focused on this issue —
but we won’t. Because right now the narrative has flipped more
dramatically than an O’Henry short story.
For several years
running, Democrats in the House have been largely united in both the
majority and the minority under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi. This
cohesion has produced a stunning list of legislative accomplishments
(and successful resistance to Republican presidential initiatives like
privatization of Social Security). When Pelosi and other senior party
leaders stepped down after the 2022 midterms, we might have expected a
wild free-for-all for their replacements. But those elections contained
about as much drama as the ones in North Korea.
Instead, it is
the Republicans who are being pulled in multiple directions by a caucus
wearing chaos as a badge of honor. At the time of this writing, it
doesn’t seem that Kevin McCarthy has locked up the votes for speaker.
Even if he gets there, he might have had to make so many concessions
that his daily hold on leadership would be as tenuous as a candle flame
in a hurricane. He has few votes to spare. That’s why his retaining the
likes of George Santos, the man who lied about his entire resume and
family history, is so important.
Stepping back from the
machinations of House leadership, the battle McCarthy faces and embodies
is a symptom of a more fundamental rot within the Republican Party. In
the coverage of McCarthy’s winding path to speaker, most of what we hear
about is power, not policy. For what does McCarthy stand? What does he
want to do with the speakership? What about his supporters? And what
about the band of Republican holdouts seeking to exact their pound of
flesh?
For that matter, what legislation did the most recent
Republican president want to pass with his power? What were his
priorities other than a border wall and “owning the libs”? And what of
those of Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders in Congress? Tax
cuts, for sure. And stacking the federal judiciary. The courts offer a
way for Republicans to get the policies they want without having to
legislate — from partisan gerrymandering to abortion bans to gutting
environmental regulations.
Whatever one thinks about the
Democrats’ agenda, one cannot deny that they like passing bills and want
majorities in the House and Senate to do just that. Using the
legislative branch to legislate: what a concept. Democrats have
compromised with Republicans to get the votes they needed. They’ve even
voted against their short-term political self-interest — as with
Obamacare, when many Democrats in Congress supported a bill they knew
was unpopular at the time and would be used against them in the upcoming
elections.
You hear almost nothing about legislation from
Republican representatives these days. It’s all about who is going to
have the power and not how they want to use it to help the American
people. We can expect investigations into the Biden administration for
sure, along with dangerous games of chicken around the debt ceiling, aid
to Ukraine, and other pressing issues. Even Newt Gingrich had his
Contract with America. This crowd mostly has their Fox News auditions in
mind.
Perhaps this is why Republicans are having such trouble
with the speaker vote. Because when you stand for nothing other than the
raw exercise of power, the only thing you’re voting on is power itself.
And who wants to give that up?
The current fight over Republican
House leadership may strike many Americans as boring, “inside the
beltway” blather that in the great scheme of things doesn’t really
amount to much. But it does, if you believe that our elected
representatives in Washington should be deciding substantive policy
issues to benefit the country and acting as responsible participants in
our constitutional system of checks and balances.
As far removed
as this dynamic may seem from the concerns of daily life, it matters. A
lot. And there may be ample proof of that in the months and years to
come.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Why didn't the NY Times or the democrats bother to do any opposition work on this fraud before the election? They totally just took NY for granted and, ironically, it cost them the house. Crazy.
They didn't lose the house by this one race though...
I know. But they lost a few more there that they likely assumed they'd win just because it's NY
Plus people always die and retire so if the margin was tad closer, that could be huge.
GOP has a four seat cushion in the House and they flipped four dem seats in the NYC suburbs, two of which on the island.
Yeah? As I said, that is a razor thin cushion. 3 would've been even slimmer, making things even more difficult for the GOP. I think the Dems took NY for granted. Big mistake.
I could have told them they were taking my district for granted, but they didn't ask me. There's a lot of that element in parts of my district covering the east part of queens and long island
Political malpractice. Shame on the media too.
I don't know what was going on there, but there are at least three community newspapers in that district and as someone who flips through them weekly I never saw anything.
Guess you didn't flip through the right one? But it really speaks to the bigger issue of what is happening to those small-town community newspapers and what they report on. Its not by chance but it'd be interesting to know who or what owns those three newspapers that you flipped through. There may very well be a plausible explanation as to why this story didn't get reported in the "lame stream" media.
Before the election, the North Shore Leader on Long Island raised multiple questions about the GOP House candidate. He was elected and is now under investigation for misrepresenting his background to voters.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s possible that theLeader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
This is a great find, but honestly the medias problem has nothing to do with disappearing newspapers. The conclusion in the above story is awful. Elections are won and lost over a tiny story, and the House flipped specifically on blue seats lost in the NY suburbs based mostly on one issue that was discussed here in NY non stop during election season, the bail reform originally enacted by Hochul.
For all the billions and billions spent by CNN NBC MSNBC (and we could lump the times and post as well) they spend comparatively little to zero time devoted to this issue, and almost all their politics time was devoted to ridiculing trump, which had been proven to have diminishing effectiveness even in this former blue region. Which coincidently, had not elected a Republican since 1998, before Steve Israel’s first term.
Yet CNN, times and post are still going on and on about trump, even after losing the House in districts that have been democratic since Clinton and Lewinsky. Big media spends billions yet is unable to answer basic questions such as which districts are actually swing and what are the important issues there. Instead it’s non stop trump and j six. Those are stories, but cmon, you have 24 hours of tv schedules and huge web sites and papers to fill, do your job.
The question should be, if the Leader was so convinced Santos was a fraud, why did they not make common sense moves like broadcasting this story on social media (ITS FREE) targeting the largest of the left media, such as CNN or MSNBC? They couldn’t get any airtime on the major cable networks with a claim of massive fraud during the campaign season? Couldn’t find a way to have a cup of coffee with morning Joe? Not sure what any of this has to do with decline of newspapers. They could have used tools available today to forward their story. They chose not to, thats the story here.
Most of the staff is part-time with other jobs or is comprised of students and retirees. Makes me think that they didn’t have a digital media professional on staff, which are key and true professionals (it’s why campaigns hire one and major celebrities sometimes as well). It’s not as easy as giving Granny Smith or Brock Jock a smart phone and a twatter account. They also don’t have the deep pockets to absorb the costs of a thorough investigation nor a potential defamation lawsuit.
Major media outlets that you mentioned are national/worldwide media outlets. They’re interested in the big stories that will resonate from Maine to California (Gabby Petito or Moscow, ID) and not one of 435 congressional districts that’s been safely dem for decades. Also, small time or town media outlets don’t have access to those corporate boardrooms or CEOs of those media outlets that you listed.
The real story is the GOP fraud party and their willingness to accept fraudulent candidates, From POOTWH to Santaria, to gain and maintain power and drive us to authoritarianism.
I get the national angle, but these media outlets have a ton of pages and hours to fill. Often, reading the times feels a lot like watching MSNBC. One month it’s non stop Jan six. The next,the Ukraine war. Like not a lot of coverage, but wall to wall excessive coverage
And NYS is not a tiny community, it’s the fourth largest state, much larger than #5. A blue state blue suburban region that flipped the house, and the story continues to get ignored. What’s concerning is a lot of the coverage is driven by the actual Democratic Party brain trust, famous for spending tons of money on campaigns with diminishing results.
As it’s understandable to miss a story here or there, to continually make representations about the electorate by trying to understand polls, voting and covering related stories, what decided the House and gave us a Republican speaker is continuing to be ignored as Jan six and trump tax stories rage on. And somehow they seem surprised and outraged how a Santos can happen. Time for media and political insiders to look in the mirror.
Will
Kevin McCarthy become the next speaker of the House?
(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Hold
on to your hats and sunglasses, folks. There’s a cyclone of crazy
swirling among the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. As
they sit precariously perched on the precipice of a very
narrow majority, we can expect more fireworks than on New Year’s Eve.
And while this show promises to be just as loud, it’s likely to be a lot
less pretty.
There was a time not that long ago (most of
the last 100 years, give or take) when Republicans were considered the
party of discipline and Democrats the party of “circular firing squads,”
civil wars, or whatever other synonym for dysfunction was preferred.
These stereotypes were unfair only insofar as they were a bit of an
exaggeration, but they were based on some kernels of truth.
As
far back as the 1920s and '30s, the humorist Will Rogers made a living
commenting on Democratic disunity. He famously quipped, “I’m not a
member of any organized political party … I’m a Democrat.” And
“Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If
they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.” His quotes have
been referenced time and again by political reporters in more recent
decades, too.
We can point to a lot of reasons for the
dysfunction. Democrats have become a "big tent" party, and big tents are
held up with a lot of different poles. A bigger tent makes room for
more religions, races, and social identities, which can bring competing
ideologies but certainly different lived experiences and personal
perspectives. Democrats are also more liberal and thus challenge the
status quo, while conservatives try to preserve it.
We could go on
and on — entire political science careers have focused on this issue —
but we won’t. Because right now the narrative has flipped more
dramatically than an O’Henry short story.
For several years
running, Democrats in the House have been largely united in both the
majority and the minority under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi. This
cohesion has produced a stunning list of legislative accomplishments
(and successful resistance to Republican presidential initiatives like
privatization of Social Security). When Pelosi and other senior party
leaders stepped down after the 2022 midterms, we might have expected a
wild free-for-all for their replacements. But those elections contained
about as much drama as the ones in North Korea.
Instead, it is
the Republicans who are being pulled in multiple directions by a caucus
wearing chaos as a badge of honor. At the time of this writing, it
doesn’t seem that Kevin McCarthy has locked up the votes for speaker.
Even if he gets there, he might have had to make so many concessions
that his daily hold on leadership would be as tenuous as a candle flame
in a hurricane. He has few votes to spare. That’s why his retaining the
likes of George Santos, the man who lied about his entire resume and
family history, is so important.
Stepping back from the
machinations of House leadership, the battle McCarthy faces and embodies
is a symptom of a more fundamental rot within the Republican Party. In
the coverage of McCarthy’s winding path to speaker, most of what we hear
about is power, not policy. For what does McCarthy stand? What does he
want to do with the speakership? What about his supporters? And what
about the band of Republican holdouts seeking to exact their pound of
flesh?
For that matter, what legislation did the most recent
Republican president want to pass with his power? What were his
priorities other than a border wall and “owning the libs”? And what of
those of Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders in Congress? Tax
cuts, for sure. And stacking the federal judiciary. The courts offer a
way for Republicans to get the policies they want without having to
legislate — from partisan gerrymandering to abortion bans to gutting
environmental regulations.
Whatever one thinks about the
Democrats’ agenda, one cannot deny that they like passing bills and want
majorities in the House and Senate to do just that. Using the
legislative branch to legislate: what a concept. Democrats have
compromised with Republicans to get the votes they needed. They’ve even
voted against their short-term political self-interest — as with
Obamacare, when many Democrats in Congress supported a bill they knew
was unpopular at the time and would be used against them in the upcoming
elections.
You hear almost nothing about legislation from
Republican representatives these days. It’s all about who is going to
have the power and not how they want to use it to help the American
people. We can expect investigations into the Biden administration for
sure, along with dangerous games of chicken around the debt ceiling, aid
to Ukraine, and other pressing issues. Even Newt Gingrich had his
Contract with America. This crowd mostly has their Fox News auditions in
mind.
Perhaps this is why Republicans are having such trouble
with the speaker vote. Because when you stand for nothing other than the
raw exercise of power, the only thing you’re voting on is power itself.
And who wants to give that up?
The current fight over Republican
House leadership may strike many Americans as boring, “inside the
beltway” blather that in the great scheme of things doesn’t really
amount to much. But it does, if you believe that our elected
representatives in Washington should be deciding substantive policy
issues to benefit the country and acting as responsible participants in
our constitutional system of checks and balances.
As far removed
as this dynamic may seem from the concerns of daily life, it matters. A
lot. And there may be ample proof of that in the months and years to
come.
A great example of media and Democratic Party problems. Speakership definitely a big story, but the opinion angles are absurd. “a more fundamental rot within the Republican Party.” Seriously? They know how to win elections and flip seats, while spending far less on advertising than the Dems. The GOP can rebound from the current infighting easily enough to win the House and White House in 22 months. But the democrats will not be able to until they understand why they lost the House two months ago. GOP knows what sells to voters, Dems don’t
Will
Kevin McCarthy become the next speaker of the House?
(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Hold
on to your hats and sunglasses, folks. There’s a cyclone of crazy
swirling among the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. As
they sit precariously perched on the precipice of a very
narrow majority, we can expect more fireworks than on New Year’s Eve.
And while this show promises to be just as loud, it’s likely to be a lot
less pretty.
There was a time not that long ago (most of
the last 100 years, give or take) when Republicans were considered the
party of discipline and Democrats the party of “circular firing squads,”
civil wars, or whatever other synonym for dysfunction was preferred.
These stereotypes were unfair only insofar as they were a bit of an
exaggeration, but they were based on some kernels of truth.
As
far back as the 1920s and '30s, the humorist Will Rogers made a living
commenting on Democratic disunity. He famously quipped, “I’m not a
member of any organized political party … I’m a Democrat.” And
“Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If
they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.” His quotes have
been referenced time and again by political reporters in more recent
decades, too.
We can point to a lot of reasons for the
dysfunction. Democrats have become a "big tent" party, and big tents are
held up with a lot of different poles. A bigger tent makes room for
more religions, races, and social identities, which can bring competing
ideologies but certainly different lived experiences and personal
perspectives. Democrats are also more liberal and thus challenge the
status quo, while conservatives try to preserve it.
We could go on
and on — entire political science careers have focused on this issue —
but we won’t. Because right now the narrative has flipped more
dramatically than an O’Henry short story.
For several years
running, Democrats in the House have been largely united in both the
majority and the minority under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi. This
cohesion has produced a stunning list of legislative accomplishments
(and successful resistance to Republican presidential initiatives like
privatization of Social Security). When Pelosi and other senior party
leaders stepped down after the 2022 midterms, we might have expected a
wild free-for-all for their replacements. But those elections contained
about as much drama as the ones in North Korea.
Instead, it is
the Republicans who are being pulled in multiple directions by a caucus
wearing chaos as a badge of honor. At the time of this writing, it
doesn’t seem that Kevin McCarthy has locked up the votes for speaker.
Even if he gets there, he might have had to make so many concessions
that his daily hold on leadership would be as tenuous as a candle flame
in a hurricane. He has few votes to spare. That’s why his retaining the
likes of George Santos, the man who lied about his entire resume and
family history, is so important.
Stepping back from the
machinations of House leadership, the battle McCarthy faces and embodies
is a symptom of a more fundamental rot within the Republican Party. In
the coverage of McCarthy’s winding path to speaker, most of what we hear
about is power, not policy. For what does McCarthy stand? What does he
want to do with the speakership? What about his supporters? And what
about the band of Republican holdouts seeking to exact their pound of
flesh?
For that matter, what legislation did the most recent
Republican president want to pass with his power? What were his
priorities other than a border wall and “owning the libs”? And what of
those of Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders in Congress? Tax
cuts, for sure. And stacking the federal judiciary. The courts offer a
way for Republicans to get the policies they want without having to
legislate — from partisan gerrymandering to abortion bans to gutting
environmental regulations.
Whatever one thinks about the
Democrats’ agenda, one cannot deny that they like passing bills and want
majorities in the House and Senate to do just that. Using the
legislative branch to legislate: what a concept. Democrats have
compromised with Republicans to get the votes they needed. They’ve even
voted against their short-term political self-interest — as with
Obamacare, when many Democrats in Congress supported a bill they knew
was unpopular at the time and would be used against them in the upcoming
elections.
You hear almost nothing about legislation from
Republican representatives these days. It’s all about who is going to
have the power and not how they want to use it to help the American
people. We can expect investigations into the Biden administration for
sure, along with dangerous games of chicken around the debt ceiling, aid
to Ukraine, and other pressing issues. Even Newt Gingrich had his
Contract with America. This crowd mostly has their Fox News auditions in
mind.
Perhaps this is why Republicans are having such trouble
with the speaker vote. Because when you stand for nothing other than the
raw exercise of power, the only thing you’re voting on is power itself.
And who wants to give that up?
The current fight over Republican
House leadership may strike many Americans as boring, “inside the
beltway” blather that in the great scheme of things doesn’t really
amount to much. But it does, if you believe that our elected
representatives in Washington should be deciding substantive policy
issues to benefit the country and acting as responsible participants in
our constitutional system of checks and balances.
As far removed
as this dynamic may seem from the concerns of daily life, it matters. A
lot. And there may be ample proof of that in the months and years to
come.
A great example of media and Democratic Party problems. Speakership definitely a big story, but the opinion angles are absurd. “a more fundamental rot within the Republican Party.” Seriously? They know how to win elections and flip seats, while spending far less on advertising than the Dems. The GOP can rebound from the current infighting easily enough to win the House and White House in 22 months. But the democrats will not be able to until they understand why they lost the House two months ago. GOP knows what sells to voters, Dems don’t
Will
Kevin McCarthy become the next speaker of the House?
(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Hold
on to your hats and sunglasses, folks. There’s a cyclone of crazy
swirling among the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. As
they sit precariously perched on the precipice of a very
narrow majority, we can expect more fireworks than on New Year’s Eve.
And while this show promises to be just as loud, it’s likely to be a lot
less pretty.
There was a time not that long ago (most of
the last 100 years, give or take) when Republicans were considered the
party of discipline and Democrats the party of “circular firing squads,”
civil wars, or whatever other synonym for dysfunction was preferred.
These stereotypes were unfair only insofar as they were a bit of an
exaggeration, but they were based on some kernels of truth.
As
far back as the 1920s and '30s, the humorist Will Rogers made a living
commenting on Democratic disunity. He famously quipped, “I’m not a
member of any organized political party … I’m a Democrat.” And
“Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If
they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.” His quotes have
been referenced time and again by political reporters in more recent
decades, too.
We can point to a lot of reasons for the
dysfunction. Democrats have become a "big tent" party, and big tents are
held up with a lot of different poles. A bigger tent makes room for
more religions, races, and social identities, which can bring competing
ideologies but certainly different lived experiences and personal
perspectives. Democrats are also more liberal and thus challenge the
status quo, while conservatives try to preserve it.
We could go on
and on — entire political science careers have focused on this issue —
but we won’t. Because right now the narrative has flipped more
dramatically than an O’Henry short story.
For several years
running, Democrats in the House have been largely united in both the
majority and the minority under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi. This
cohesion has produced a stunning list of legislative accomplishments
(and successful resistance to Republican presidential initiatives like
privatization of Social Security). When Pelosi and other senior party
leaders stepped down after the 2022 midterms, we might have expected a
wild free-for-all for their replacements. But those elections contained
about as much drama as the ones in North Korea.
Instead, it is
the Republicans who are being pulled in multiple directions by a caucus
wearing chaos as a badge of honor. At the time of this writing, it
doesn’t seem that Kevin McCarthy has locked up the votes for speaker.
Even if he gets there, he might have had to make so many concessions
that his daily hold on leadership would be as tenuous as a candle flame
in a hurricane. He has few votes to spare. That’s why his retaining the
likes of George Santos, the man who lied about his entire resume and
family history, is so important.
Stepping back from the
machinations of House leadership, the battle McCarthy faces and embodies
is a symptom of a more fundamental rot within the Republican Party. In
the coverage of McCarthy’s winding path to speaker, most of what we hear
about is power, not policy. For what does McCarthy stand? What does he
want to do with the speakership? What about his supporters? And what
about the band of Republican holdouts seeking to exact their pound of
flesh?
For that matter, what legislation did the most recent
Republican president want to pass with his power? What were his
priorities other than a border wall and “owning the libs”? And what of
those of Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders in Congress? Tax
cuts, for sure. And stacking the federal judiciary. The courts offer a
way for Republicans to get the policies they want without having to
legislate — from partisan gerrymandering to abortion bans to gutting
environmental regulations.
Whatever one thinks about the
Democrats’ agenda, one cannot deny that they like passing bills and want
majorities in the House and Senate to do just that. Using the
legislative branch to legislate: what a concept. Democrats have
compromised with Republicans to get the votes they needed. They’ve even
voted against their short-term political self-interest — as with
Obamacare, when many Democrats in Congress supported a bill they knew
was unpopular at the time and would be used against them in the upcoming
elections.
You hear almost nothing about legislation from
Republican representatives these days. It’s all about who is going to
have the power and not how they want to use it to help the American
people. We can expect investigations into the Biden administration for
sure, along with dangerous games of chicken around the debt ceiling, aid
to Ukraine, and other pressing issues. Even Newt Gingrich had his
Contract with America. This crowd mostly has their Fox News auditions in
mind.
Perhaps this is why Republicans are having such trouble
with the speaker vote. Because when you stand for nothing other than the
raw exercise of power, the only thing you’re voting on is power itself.
And who wants to give that up?
The current fight over Republican
House leadership may strike many Americans as boring, “inside the
beltway” blather that in the great scheme of things doesn’t really
amount to much. But it does, if you believe that our elected
representatives in Washington should be deciding substantive policy
issues to benefit the country and acting as responsible participants in
our constitutional system of checks and balances.
As far removed
as this dynamic may seem from the concerns of daily life, it matters. A
lot. And there may be ample proof of that in the months and years to
come.
A great example of media and Democratic Party problems. Speakership definitely a big story, but the opinion angles are absurd. “a more fundamental rot within the Republican Party.” Seriously? They know how to win elections and flip seats, while spending far less on advertising than the Dems. The GOP can rebound from the current infighting easily enough to win the House and White House in 22 months. But the democrats will not be able to until they understand why they lost the House two months ago. GOP knows what sells to voters, Dems don’t
Do they know how to flip seats? They didn't flip AZ, NV or GA, the ones that really matter. I know you're focused on LI, but that's not really national news. The GOP lost lots of seats they should have won.
Tomorrow is the big vote. What are the predictions? Can McCarthy get to 218 or will the hard right blow him up?
Rep,Don Bacon has said more than once that the caucus will work with Ds to elect a moderate representative to the Speaker if necessary. I think this is totally plausible and would be both hilarious and great for the country. I don’t see how McCarthy gets the gavel unless several of the freedom caucus are just bluffing really late into the process.
Tomorrow is the big vote. What are the predictions? Can McCarthy get to 218 or will the hard right blow him up?
Rep,Don Bacon has said more than once that the caucus will work with Ds to elect a moderate representative to the Speaker if necessary. I think this is totally plausible and would be both hilarious and great for the country. I don’t see how McCarthy gets the gavel unless several of the freedom caucus are just bluffing really late into the process.
McCarthy is going to sell his soul for the third time and eventually get it. The crazies are going to make him sweat it out.
Tomorrow is the big vote. What are the predictions? Can McCarthy get to 218 or will the hard right blow him up?
Rep,Don Bacon has said more than once that the caucus will work with Ds to elect a moderate representative to the Speaker if necessary. I think this is totally plausible and would be both hilarious and great for the country. I don’t see how McCarthy gets the gavel unless several of the freedom caucus are just bluffing really late into the process.
i think after multiple votes mccarthy will get it.
i saw forehead gaetz was calling for jim jordan to be speaker on twitter today.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Tomorrow is the big vote. What are the predictions? Can McCarthy get to 218 or will the hard right blow him up?
Rep,Don Bacon has said more than once that the caucus will work with Ds to elect a moderate representative to the Speaker if necessary. I think this is totally plausible and would be both hilarious and great for the country. I don’t see how McCarthy gets the gavel unless several of the freedom caucus are just bluffing really late into the process.
its been reported that McCarthy already moved into the speakers office.....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Tomorrow is the big vote. What are the predictions? Can McCarthy get to 218 or will the hard right blow him up?
Rep,Don Bacon has said more than once that the caucus will work with Ds to elect a moderate representative to the Speaker if necessary. I think this is totally plausible and would be both hilarious and great for the country. I don’t see how McCarthy gets the gavel unless several of the freedom caucus are just bluffing really late into the process.
its been reported that McCarthy already moved into the speakers office.....
Is that the equivalent of Clark Griswold ordering up a pool install before he gets his bonus?
Tomorrow is the big vote. What are the predictions? Can McCarthy get to 218 or will the hard right blow him up?
Rep,Don Bacon has said more than once that the caucus will work with Ds to elect a moderate representative to the Speaker if necessary. I think this is totally plausible and would be both hilarious and great for the country. I don’t see how McCarthy gets the gavel unless several of the freedom caucus are just bluffing really late into the process.
its been reported that McCarthy already moved into the speakers office.....
Is that the equivalent of Clark Griswold ordering up a pool install before he gets his bonus?
Comments
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A tiny paper rang alarm bells about George Santos in September. Very few noticed.
Months before the New York Times published a December article suggesting Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) had fabricated much of his résumé and biography, a tiny publication on Long Island was ringing alarm bells about its local candidate.
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth — from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
“Interestingly, Santos shows no U.S. real property in his financial disclosure, although he has repeatedly claimed to own ‘a mansion in Oyster Bay Cove’ on Tiffany Road; and ‘a mansion in the Hamptons’ on Dune Road,” managing editor Maureen Daly wrote in the Leader. “For a man of such alleged wealth, campaign records show that Santos and his husband live in a rented apartment, in an attached rowhouse in Queens.”
The Leader reluctantly endorsed Santos’s Democratic opponent the next month. “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican,” it wrote, but Santos “is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot. … He boasts like an insecure child — but he’s most likely just a fabulist — a fake.”
It was the stuff national headlines are supposed to be built on: A hyperlocal outlet like the Leader does the leg work, regional papers verify and amplify the story, and before long an emerging political scandal is being broadcast coast-to-coast.
But that system, which has atrophied for decades amid the destruction of news economies, appears to have failed completely this time. Despite a well-heeled and well-connected readership — the Leader’s publisher says it counts among its subscribers Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters and several senior people at Newsday, a once-mighty Long Island-based tabloid that has won 19 Pulitzers — no one followed its story before Election Day.
When Santos apologized for “embellishing my résumé,” in a New York Post interview published Monday, he also vowed to serve out his term as a U.S. congressman.
Local news doesn’t get much more local than the Leader. A weekly published and primarily run by Grant Lally, an attorney whose parents bought it in the late 1990s, most of the newspaper’s staff works part time and holds down other jobs to pay the bills.
“Nobody can survive on local papers alone,” Lally said in an interview.
Lally was particularly well-prepared to cover the race for New York’s 3rd; he had run for the seat himself in 1994, 1996 and again in 2014. A lifelong Republican, Lally was George W. Bush’s floor manager in Miami during the 2000 presidential election recount.
The Leader’s staff, which includes students and retirees, all are steeped in the largely wealthy local communities on the North Shore of Long Island, which gives them access to local political gossip. “We can boil that down very quickly,” said Lally.
A few years ago, Lally said, he went to lunch with Santos, who was soliciting support for his political career. “Right from the start, there was something off with him,” he recalled.
Santos told Lally that his family was from Belgium. Years later, Lally said, he watched Santos on the campaign trail “talking about his grandparents who had fled the Holocaust from Ukraine.”
“It was just a flagrant blatant concoction,” Lally said.
Lally has stayed in touch with his former staffers from his congressional campaigns, who would sometimes call him to gossip about local elections over the spring and summer. “You wouldn’t believe what we are seeing about Santos,” Lally recalled being told on some of those calls.
One tip came from a local home builder who said he had driven Santos around Long Island to look at mansions the candidate claimed to own and wanted to renovate. But Santos wouldn’t let the builder inside any of the homes, Lally said. He claimed he had tenants that prevented them from entering.
Another call came from a state senator who said a house in the Hamptons that Santos claimed to own was worth far less than the candidate said — and was owned by someone else anyway.
These tips helped inform the Leader’s reporting and its editorial, which were deeply skeptical of Santos’s claims of sudden riches.
“We expected it to pop a lot more than it did,” Lally said. For one, he thought that Santos’s opponent, Robert Zimmerman (D), would have made more of the Leader’s endorsement and “pushed” the contradictions his newspaper uncovered into larger publications such as Newsday and the New York Times.
Zimmerman told the Post that there were “many red flags that were brought to the attention of many folks in the media” but that “frankly a lot of folks in the media are saying they didn’t have the personnel, time or money to delve further” into the story. “This experience has shown me just how important it is for everyone to support local media.”
Kim Como, a spokeswoman for Newsday, did not answer specific questions about the paper’s coverage of Santos but said in a statement: “We are continuing to cover the Santos story every day.”
It’s possible that the Leader’s reporting fell into a void in part because there are fewer papers to cover the news than in the past. The number of journalists has declined by 60 percent since 2005, according to government statistics.
Research from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this year found that on average two newspapers are disappearing in the U.S. every week. The nation has lost more than a quarter of its newspapers since 2005 and is on track to lose one-third by 2025. There are now more than 1,600 counties with only one newspaper, typically a weekly.
“Local journalists are kind of like having beat cops walking the street,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean and professor at the Medill School. “Just as good beat cops can help keep a neighborhood safer, the presence of local journalists help to keep our politics more honest and our government more accountable.”
Franklin predicts that “if we don’t fix the crisis in local news, we’re going to see more George Santos-type cases and instances of politicians going unchecked.”
Santos and his representatives did not respond to requests for comment.
A tiny paper broke the George Santos scandal, but no one paid attention - The Washington Post
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Albany 2006 Camden 2006 E. Rutherford 2, 2006 Inglewood 2006,
Chicago 2007
Camden 2008 MSG 2008 MSG 2008 Hartford 2008.
Seattle 2009 Seattle 2009 Philadelphia 2009,Philadelphia 2009 Philadelphia 2009
Hartford 2010 MSG 2010 MSG 2010
Toronto 2011,Toronto 2011
Wrigley Field 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Philadelphia 2, 2013
Philadelphia 1, 2016 Philadelphia 2 2016 New York 2016 New York 2016 Fenway 1, 2016
Fenway 2, 2018
MSG 2022
St. Paul, 1, St. Paul 2 2023
MSG 2024, MSG 2024
Philadelphia 2024
"I play good, hard-nosed basketball.
Things happen in the game. Nothing you
can do. I don't go and say,
"I'm gonna beat this guy up."
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Brilliantati©
wapo. xm references a point in that article
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Albany 2006 Camden 2006 E. Rutherford 2, 2006 Inglewood 2006,
Chicago 2007
Camden 2008 MSG 2008 MSG 2008 Hartford 2008.
Seattle 2009 Seattle 2009 Philadelphia 2009,Philadelphia 2009 Philadelphia 2009
Hartford 2010 MSG 2010 MSG 2010
Toronto 2011,Toronto 2011
Wrigley Field 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Philadelphia 2, 2013
Philadelphia 1, 2016 Philadelphia 2 2016 New York 2016 New York 2016 Fenway 1, 2016
Fenway 2, 2018
MSG 2022
St. Paul, 1, St. Paul 2 2023
MSG 2024, MSG 2024
Philadelphia 2024
"I play good, hard-nosed basketball.
Things happen in the game. Nothing you
can do. I don't go and say,
"I'm gonna beat this guy up."
Albany 2006 Camden 2006 E. Rutherford 2, 2006 Inglewood 2006,
Chicago 2007
Camden 2008 MSG 2008 MSG 2008 Hartford 2008.
Seattle 2009 Seattle 2009 Philadelphia 2009,Philadelphia 2009 Philadelphia 2009
Hartford 2010 MSG 2010 MSG 2010
Toronto 2011,Toronto 2011
Wrigley Field 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Brooklyn 2013 Philadelphia 2, 2013
Philadelphia 1, 2016 Philadelphia 2 2016 New York 2016 New York 2016 Fenway 1, 2016
Fenway 2, 2018
MSG 2022
St. Paul, 1, St. Paul 2 2023
MSG 2024, MSG 2024
Philadelphia 2024
"I play good, hard-nosed basketball.
Things happen in the game. Nothing you
can do. I don't go and say,
"I'm gonna beat this guy up."
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3791160-desantis-administration-launches-investigation-into-holiday-drag-show/
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For all the billions and billions spent by CNN NBC MSNBC (and we could lump the times and post as well) they spend comparatively little to zero time devoted to this issue, and almost all their politics time was devoted to ridiculing trump, which had been proven to have diminishing effectiveness even in this former blue region. Which coincidently, had not elected a Republican since 1998, before Steve Israel’s first term.
The question should be, if the Leader was so convinced Santos was a fraud, why did they not make common sense moves like broadcasting this story on social media (ITS FREE) targeting the largest of the left media, such as CNN or MSNBC? They couldn’t get any airtime on the major cable networks with a claim of massive fraud during the campaign season? Couldn’t find a way to have a cup of coffee with morning Joe? Not sure what any of this has to do with decline of newspapers. They could have used tools available today to forward their story. They chose not to, thats the story here.
Major media outlets that you mentioned are national/worldwide media outlets. They’re interested in the big stories that will resonate from Maine to California (Gabby Petito or Moscow, ID) and not one of 435 congressional districts that’s been safely dem for decades. Also, small time or town media outlets don’t have access to those corporate boardrooms or CEOs of those media outlets that you listed.
The real story is the GOP fraud party and their willingness to accept fraudulent candidates, From POOTWH to Santaria, to gain and maintain power and drive us to authoritarianism.
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the take away from this is Americans arent holding GOP feet to the fire this because it is EXPECTED that their GOP and its candidates ARE LIARS AND WILL ALWAYS LIE OR OVERLOOK LIES. That job now falls to the Dems and For Profit Media top correct etc.......
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
So Dems and their aligned media have to do it all? I’m not buying that. If that’s the “solution,” turn out the lights.
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I could counter that the dems just need to stoop to the repub fraud level and if they’re going to accuse dems of all of these evil things they’re supposedly doing, the dems might as well do them. It doesn’t make sense, just as Bo’s thought doesn’t make sense.
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https://www.businessinsider.com/kris-kobach-fine-fec-illegal-contribution-we-build-the-wall-2022-12
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A Cyclone of Crazy
House Republicans try to choose a speaker
Hold on to your hats and sunglasses, folks. There’s a cyclone of crazy swirling among the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. As they sit precariously perched on the precipice of a very narrow majority, we can expect more fireworks than on New Year’s Eve. And while this show promises to be just as loud, it’s likely to be a lot less pretty.
There was a time not that long ago (most of the last 100 years, give or take) when Republicans were considered the party of discipline and Democrats the party of “circular firing squads,” civil wars, or whatever other synonym for dysfunction was preferred. These stereotypes were unfair only insofar as they were a bit of an exaggeration, but they were based on some kernels of truth.
As far back as the 1920s and '30s, the humorist Will Rogers made a living commenting on Democratic disunity. He famously quipped, “I’m not a member of any organized political party … I’m a Democrat.” And “Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they’d be Republicans.” His quotes have been referenced time and again by political reporters in more recent decades, too.
We can point to a lot of reasons for the dysfunction. Democrats have become a "big tent" party, and big tents are held up with a lot of different poles. A bigger tent makes room for more religions, races, and social identities, which can bring competing ideologies but certainly different lived experiences and personal perspectives. Democrats are also more liberal and thus challenge the status quo, while conservatives try to preserve it.
We could go on and on — entire political science careers have focused on this issue — but we won’t. Because right now the narrative has flipped more dramatically than an O’Henry short story.
For several years running, Democrats in the House have been largely united in both the majority and the minority under the leadership of Nancy Pelosi. This cohesion has produced a stunning list of legislative accomplishments (and successful resistance to Republican presidential initiatives like privatization of Social Security). When Pelosi and other senior party leaders stepped down after the 2022 midterms, we might have expected a wild free-for-all for their replacements. But those elections contained about as much drama as the ones in North Korea.
Instead, it is the Republicans who are being pulled in multiple directions by a caucus wearing chaos as a badge of honor. At the time of this writing, it doesn’t seem that Kevin McCarthy has locked up the votes for speaker. Even if he gets there, he might have had to make so many concessions that his daily hold on leadership would be as tenuous as a candle flame in a hurricane. He has few votes to spare. That’s why his retaining the likes of George Santos, the man who lied about his entire resume and family history, is so important.
Stepping back from the machinations of House leadership, the battle McCarthy faces and embodies is a symptom of a more fundamental rot within the Republican Party. In the coverage of McCarthy’s winding path to speaker, most of what we hear about is power, not policy. For what does McCarthy stand? What does he want to do with the speakership? What about his supporters? And what about the band of Republican holdouts seeking to exact their pound of flesh?
For that matter, what legislation did the most recent Republican president want to pass with his power? What were his priorities other than a border wall and “owning the libs”? And what of those of Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders in Congress? Tax cuts, for sure. And stacking the federal judiciary. The courts offer a way for Republicans to get the policies they want without having to legislate — from partisan gerrymandering to abortion bans to gutting environmental regulations.
Whatever one thinks about the Democrats’ agenda, one cannot deny that they like passing bills and want majorities in the House and Senate to do just that. Using the legislative branch to legislate: what a concept. Democrats have compromised with Republicans to get the votes they needed. They’ve even voted against their short-term political self-interest — as with Obamacare, when many Democrats in Congress supported a bill they knew was unpopular at the time and would be used against them in the upcoming elections.
You hear almost nothing about legislation from Republican representatives these days. It’s all about who is going to have the power and not how they want to use it to help the American people. We can expect investigations into the Biden administration for sure, along with dangerous games of chicken around the debt ceiling, aid to Ukraine, and other pressing issues. Even Newt Gingrich had his Contract with America. This crowd mostly has their Fox News auditions in mind.
Perhaps this is why Republicans are having such trouble with the speaker vote. Because when you stand for nothing other than the raw exercise of power, the only thing you’re voting on is power itself. And who wants to give that up?
The current fight over Republican House leadership may strike many Americans as boring, “inside the beltway” blather that in the great scheme of things doesn’t really amount to much. But it does, if you believe that our elected representatives in Washington should be deciding substantive policy issues to benefit the country and acting as responsible participants in our constitutional system of checks and balances.
As far removed as this dynamic may seem from the concerns of daily life, it matters. A lot. And there may be ample proof of that in the months and years to come.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
And NYS is not a tiny community, it’s the fourth largest state, much larger than #5. A blue state blue suburban region that flipped the house, and the story continues to get ignored. What’s concerning is a lot of the coverage is driven by the actual Democratic Party brain trust, famous for spending tons of money on campaigns with diminishing results.
As it’s understandable to miss a story here or there, to continually make representations about the electorate by trying to understand polls, voting and covering related stories, what decided the House and gave us a Republican speaker is continuing to be ignored as Jan six and trump tax stories rage on. And somehow they seem surprised and outraged how a Santos can happen. Time for media and political insiders to look in the mirror.
A great example of media and Democratic Party problems. Speakership definitely a big story, but the opinion angles are absurd. “a more fundamental rot within the Republican Party.” Seriously? They know how to win elections and flip seats, while spending far less on advertising than the Dems. The GOP can rebound from the current infighting easily enough to win the House and White House in 22 months. But the democrats will not be able to until they understand why they lost the House two months ago. GOP knows what sells to voters, Dems don’t
There are no kings inside the gates of eden
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i saw forehead gaetz was calling for jim jordan to be speaker on twitter today.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
if he were a dem they would have forced him to resign days ago.
but mccarthy needs his vote for the speakership so of course they are going to seat him.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
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