Obama on Trump’s bad move:

There are few issues more important to the security of the United States than the potential spread of nuclear weapons, or the potential for even more destructive war in the Middle East. That’s why the United States negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in the first place.

The reality is clear. The JCPOA is working – that is a view shared by our European allies, independent experts, and the current U.S. Secretary of Defense. The JCPOA is in America’s interest – it has significantly rolled back Iran’s nuclear program. And the JCPOA is a model for what diplomacy can accomplish – its inspections and verification regime is precisely what the United States … Read the rest

The BBC on Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran deal:

Calling it “decaying and rotten”, he said the deal was “an embarrassment” to him “as a citizen”.

Going against advice from European allies, he said he would reimpose economic sanctions that were waived when the deal was signed in 2015.

In response, Iran said it was preparing to restart uranium enrichment, key for making both nuclear energy and weapons.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said: “The US has announced that it doesn’t respect its commitments.”

Trump has announced.

But then what is Trump but everybody’s idea of The Worst American?

Analysis by Jonathan Marcus, BBC defence and diplomatic correspondent

With a stroke of his pen President Trump has jeopardised the one

This again. Somebody at the White House pretends Melania Trump wrote a thing that was actually written by someone in the Obama administration. Why do that?

US First Lady Melania Trump has been caught up in another plagiarism row, following the launch of her new online safety for children campaign on Monday.

A booklet put out by Mrs Trump bore a striking resemblance to one published under the Obama administration.

The text and graphics of the “Be Best” booklet were nearly identical to those in the previous edition.

Well that’s not “a striking resemblance,” it’s plagiarism. Words aren’t like faces; you don’t have a resemblance, you have the same words. The word “good” isn’t “like” the word “good”; it … Read the rest

Jeff Sessions: Parents and children illegally crossing the U.S. border will be separated https://t.co/AWmbyUi7YE

— TIME (@TIME) May 8, 2018

… Read the rest

Talia Lavin notes with what a light heart men can ask hey now if we talk about fairness in the distribution of wealth, income, health care, housing, why can’t we talk about it in the distribution of access to women’s genitalia?

Let’s reconstruct this sequence of events, shall we?

Shortly before he committed mass murder on April 23, Alek Minassian, 25, logged on to Facebook. “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161,” he posted. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

It looks like typical online bullshit, but he wasn’t joking or playacting or bullshitting; he meant it.

A few

Scott Pruitt has been hiding his activities and schedule from public view.

But a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club, the environmental group, has resulted in the release of 10,703 pages of documents that detail Mr. Pruitt’s plans for travel and appearances nationwide. The documents offer visibility for the first time not only into many of his appearances but into the agency’s pursuit of secrecy as well.

The emails — concerning events like a closed-door speech to power plant owners in Missouri, a secret visit to Toyota’s auto plant in Texas and a town-hall style speech to farmers in Iowa where organizers clamped down on questions — show the E.P.A.’s chief concern was about controlling who would

Life near Kilauea right now:

#BREAKING This is video just into our newsroom. It was shot 5 acres in on Makamae St. on the Kalapana side. #Kilauea pic.twitter.com/BbXK15eCG0

— Allyson Blair (@AllysonBlairTV) May 5, 2018

One has to wonder why anyone was allowed to build there.… Read the rest

Mark Townsend and Julian Borger report:

Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.

Watergate much?

Although sources have confirmed that contact and an initial plan of attack was provided to private investigators by representatives of Trump, it is not clear how much

Maddow did a rather brilliant exposition yesterday about Rod Rosenstein’s admiration of FDR’s Attorney General Robert Jackson and how that ties in to Rosenstein’s resistance to Republican demands for documents from an ongoing investigation. Rosenstein has a big portrait of Jackson in his Deputy AG conference room, hung so that it’s over his right shoulder when he sits at the head of the table for meetings. Jackson went from AG to the Supreme Court, from which he took a leave (a most unusual thing for a supreme to do) to be the prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

She drew on a story the Times did on May 2 about those Republican demands for docs from a live investigation. I’ve … Read the rest

Now Toby Young gets in on the act – hey all you lefty types think money should be more equitably shared so how come you don’t think the same thing about access to women, huh huh huh?

Robin Hanson, Alek Minassian, incel rebellion, Elliot Rodger, Chad and Stacy, blah blah.

Hanson wasn’t defending these two mass murderers, but querying why incels had been dismissed in the media as ‘self-pitying’ and ‘lonely weirdos’ in the aftermath of the Toronto attack, often by the same journalists and commentators who decry other forms of inequality. Why are terrorists who murder people in the name of redistributing wealth, like Che Guevara, lionised by the left, whereas terrorists whose aim is to draw attention to

The New York Times introduces us to a fascinatingly original and independent-minded couple in a large west coast city:

When Amanda Davidson, a 42-year-old Los Angeles-based artist and writer, welcomed her firstborn child in December — a boy named Felix — with her partner Isaac Schankler, 39, a composer, she chafed at the assumptions the medical staff members made about how the pair wanted to identify themselves as parents.

“‘Hi, Mommy! Where’s Daddy? Mommy needs to know this, but so does Daddy,’” she said with a big laugh. The binary clashed so much with how the couple sees themselves and exists in the world — she’s queer-identified, and her partner goes by pronouns they/their/them and uses the gender-neutral title Mx.

Maryam Namazie writes:

Egyptian Atheist and Youtube Vlogger Sherif Gaber has disappeared and is most likely arrested when trying to leave the country on Wednesday 2nd May. He sent a message to friends telling them he was stopped and taken to an interrogation room at Cairo airport and his passport confiscated. No one has heard from him since. The last message from Sherif on Wednesday 2nd May at 11:08 am Cairo time:

“I am suppose to be traveling to Malaysia at 12:05 Cairo Time, an hour from now. The police took me and made me wait in this room for 2 hours and I’m still waiting> they took my belongings and my passport. If I don’t update you in

Guest post by Bruce Everett

I’ve always had a lingering suspicion about the rule to “never punch down/only punch up”. What started out as a heuristic for comedians seems to be apt at morphing into a kind of social contagion along the lines of what Bertrand Russell wrote about in ‘The Superior Virtue of The Oppressed’.

Yes, people are oppressed to varying extents. No, that’s not good. Neither is taking advantage of people’s social standing to enact sadism for shits and giggles. Conflict occurs across the power differentials. That’s not disputed.

But in practice, and especially in groups of people, this rule doesn’t always seem to work so well.

For one, it appeals to people’s sentiments and naturally, people forget … Read the rest