Classic. Trump’s own people tell him that Scott Pruitt’s many corrupt and/or brainless acts have made him toxic and Trump reeeeeeeally ought to replace him with someone not quite so extravagant and cozy with lobbyists, but Trump is so happy with the way Pruitt is making the water dirty again that he just can’t bear to lose him. Dirty water and filthy air for the people! Wave the tiny fist!

John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, told President Trump last week that Scott Pruitt, the embattled administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, needed to go in the wake of damaging allegations about ethical infractions and spending irregularities, according to two officials briefed about the conversation.

But Mr. Trump, who is personally fond of Mr. Pruitt and sees him as a crucial ally in his effort to roll back environmental rules, has resisted firing him, disregarding warnings that the drumbeat of negative headlines about the administrator has grown unsustainable and that more embarrassing revelations could surface.

Yes yes yes yes but he’s rolling back environmental rules. What does the drumbeat of “negative” headlines amount to next to that? They get to trash the environment!! It’s worth all the bad headlines anyone could come up with to be able to ruin everything.

White House officials said on Friday that Mr. Trump continues to believe that Mr. Pruitt has been effective in his role, and stressed that it was up to the president alone to decide his fate.

“No one other than the president has the authority to hire and fire,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters. “The president feels that the administrator has done a good job at E.P.A.”

Okay, Sarah, but he’s still the stupidest meanest laziest adult any of us have ever seen.

Earlier, in a brief interview, Ms. Sanders said that Mr. Pruitt’s success in achieving items on the president’s agenda — including rolling back a large number of environmental regulations — may weigh heavily as a counterbalance to allegations that he misused taxpayer dollars.

“He likes the work product,” she said of Mr. Trump.

Of course he does. He can buy clean air and water, and people who can’t afford to do that should go live in what’s its name, the one up there – Canada.

On Friday, Mr. Trump pushed back against news reports that he had considered replacing Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, with Mr. Pruitt, saying in a tweet that his E.P.A. chief “is doing a great job but is TOTALLY under siege.”

That came hours before yet another embarrassing revelation Friday afternoon, when Politico reported that the lobbyists who owned the condominium Mr. Pruitt paid $50 a night to rent had leased the space to him for only six weeks, and became frustrated when he declined for months to leave, eventually pushing him out and changing the locks.

Hahahahahahahaha he’s the Bad Roommate. He’s the asshole who won’t leave. He’s out in the street with all his underpants in a pile.

He still has his job though.

When the ideology becomes life-threatening.

A young #trans man broke his arm playing football & is rushed to hospital. Before being treated he is asked to discuss his trans status & hormones at length. Why? So wrong! SEE: https://t.co/iJ8K3u47jk @RozKaveney @MunroeBergdorf @JakeGraf1 @christineburns @MxJackMonroe

— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) April 5, 2018

Peter Tatchell tweets:

A young #trans man broke his arm playing football & is rushed to hospital. Before being treated he is asked to discuss his trans status & hormones at length. Why? So wrong!

It’s called taking a medical history, and it has to be done. They have to know what meds patients are on in order to avoid killing them. That’s why.

Jessica Valenti points out what one would think was obvious: something said on Twitter isn’t magically not what the tweeter actually thinks, simply by virtue of being on Twitter.

On Thursday, the recently hired columnist Kevin Williamson was fired from the Atlantic after an uproar over his views on abortion – namely his belief, first mentioned in a 2014 tweet, that women who have the procedure should be executed by hanging.

Initially, the editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, defended Williamson, writing in a memo to staff that he did not believe “taking a person’s worst tweets … in isolation is the best journalistic practice”. But after the release of a podcast in which Williamson talked at length about hanging women, the writer was fired, and Goldberg admitted “that the original tweet did, in fact, represent [Williamson’s] carefully considered views”.

But sometimes a person’s worst tweets, like a person’s worst blurts or jokes or exclamations, tell you something.

Expressing a belief in a tweet – or on Facebook or Instagram – does not make that belief any less yours. That’s why I found it so odd when New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote an open letter to Williamson this weekend, apologizing to him over having his character “assassinated”.

“I jumped at your abortion comment, but for heaven’s sake, it was a tweet. When you write a whole book on the need to execute the tens of millions of American women who’ve had abortions, then I’ll worry,” Stephens wrote.

Easy for him; he’s not among the people Williamson would like to see hanged.

The truth, of course, is that Williamson never should have been hired in the first place; the Atlantic and Goldberg knew about Williamson’s belief about executing women who had abortions and brought him on anyway. They knew they would be forcing the women at the magazine – some of whom we can assume have had abortions – to sit in an office with a man who wanted them dead.

Or not so much wanted them dead as thought they ought to be dead, because executed by hanging for ending their own pregnancies. In a way that’s worse. Just wanting them dead…well lots of men seem to feel that way about women. But thinking they ought to be dead? At official hands, for making decisions about their own bodies? That’s cold.

So this is what they think of us.

Of conservative writers, Kevin Williamson is one of those most willing to be heterodox, most committed to reality-based reporting, with a bold intellect and indomitable character. But the philistine progressive mob can’t stand him. Why? Because he won’t bend the knee…to them.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 28, 2018

Heterodox, bold, indomitable – that’s how we describe a columnist who advocates hanging for women who end their pregnancies?

It’s “philistine progressive” to say a columnist who advocates hanging for women who end their pregnancies shouldn’t be on the staff of a mainstream magazine? On the grounds that advocating  hanging for millions of women should not be normalized in that way? If only we were less “philistine” we would understand the profundity and subtlety and artistry of advocating hanging for millions of women? It’s “heterodox” to advocate hanging for millions of women? Heterodox and bold and indomitable? It’s not murderous and genocidal and misogynist?

Nobody expects conservatives to agree with everything left, or they wouldn’t be conservatives. We expect them to be decent human beings who would not execute women for a medical procedure we don’t think should be illegal. That’s not a stratospheric bar.

— Ms Goodlibrarian (@goodlibrarian) March 29, 2018

Here’s a surprise: the Trump administration has thrown down some sanctions on Friends of Putin.

The US has imposed sanctions on seven Russian oligarchs and 17 senior government officials, accusing them of “malign activity around the globe”.

Twelve companies owned by the oligarchs, the state arms exporter and a bank are also sanctioned.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the penalties targeted those profiting from Russia’s “corrupt system”.

The move was a response to Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, he said.

The sanctions are also being imposed because of the actions taken by the Kremlin in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Syria, Mr Mnuchin said in a statement on Friday.

He accused the Russian government of “malicious” cyber-activities and said the sanctions would target “those who benefit from the Putin regime”.

Well. I can’t help thinking that will sour Trump’s friendship with Volodya.

Alexander Torshin, a senior Russian official with reported ties to the National Rifle Association of America (NRA), has been blacklisted.

Mr Putin’s bodyguard, his son-in-law, the head of Russia’s national security council, and former prime minister Viktor Zubkov are also sanctioned.

Russian state arms exporter Rosoboronexport, one of the companies targeted, said the sanctions were designed to force Russia out of the global arms market.

Any assets they have under US jurisdiction have been frozen and US nationals are forbidden from doing to do business with them.

No that really doesn’t seem like something Putin will cheerfully embrace.

Women in STEM fields have a laundry list of stories about men telling them they aren’t clever enough to be there.

A new study published Wednesday adds to a growing body of hard evidence to back up those stories.

It finds that men in STEM subject areas overestimate their own intelligence and credentials, [and] underestimate the abilities of female colleagues, and that as a result, women themselves doubt their abilities — even when hard evidence such as grades say otherwise.

It’s a wonderful loop, isn’t it – men think they’re better than they are so they forge confidently ahead regardless and they feel entitled to tell women they’re not good enough so women are kneecapped, so men think they’re even more better than they are and so on forever.

The students worked in groups and as partners and when asked to rate themselves compared to their closest workmate, the men thought they’d be smarter than 61 percent of their colleagues. Women put the number closer to 33 percent.

“This echoes what has been previously shown in the literature; a review of nearly 20 published papers on self-estimated intelligence concluded that men rate themselves higher than women on self-estimated intelligence,” Cooper and Brownell wrote in their report, published in Advances in Physiology Education.

“More and more of these studies are painting similar pictures,” Brownell said.

Yes, I’ve seen them before, and I bet we all have.

So what’s the result? STEM fields are full of Damore-type men telling women they’re not smart enough, or, more euphemistically aka deniably they’re more into relationships than mathematics. Also, in a thrilling new bonus, they have platoons of thinky men telling us all that this is Free Speech and must be not only protected but encouraged and widely disseminated and greeted with rapture. How dare Google fire Damore just for fitting this pattern of Mediocre Men Telling Women They Are Too Stupid Empathetic to Work at Google?

Ilana Seidel Horn, a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University, says it’s been shown that girls and women doubt their own mastery of a subject more than boys and men do.

“Really bright girls often don’t feel like they know something unless they very much understand it, whereas boys are more comfortable saying they understand something without having an actual deeper understanding,” Horn said.

It’s more of a guy thing.

The attitudes do not stay inside people’s heads. Pearson said she felt the disdain of her male classmates regularly.

“I can’t even tell you how many of my early successes (awards and grants) were attributed to my being the only girl, and ‘they had to’ give the award to a woman,” Pearson said.

“I am reasonably successful by a variety of measures, but I still doubt everything I do. And it’s because a lifetime of being told I don’t belong and I’m not good enough that got into my head.”

Even the most confident girl or woman might begin to doubt herself when confronted with such attitudes from fellow students, teachers and colleagues, Brownell said.

Drip drip drip.

Jezebel:

It is not easy to admit our mistakes, particularly now, given the current media climate and general culture of intolerance on college campuses. Still, we feel that we owe our readers an apology.

We should not have hired Cannibal Witch, an elegant writer and thinker who, we have come to believe, after serious consideration, does indeed eat children.

They thought she might change. They thought she deserved a second chance.

However, it was Cannibal Witch’s recent appearance on Lou Dobbs’s podcast, Dobb Knobbin’ with Lou Dobbs—during which she discussed having eaten children as recently as today—that we have decided to part ways. The language she used to describe eating children made it clear to us that her original tweets about eating children did, in fact, represent her carefully considered diet of children.

They meant well. They meant so well.

H/t Pieter Breitner

Guest post by Maureen Brian.

Midnight on April 4th was the deadline for companies to submit their data on their gender pay gap, if any, to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Then some editor at the BBC had the notion of inviting wannabee-famous Jordan Peterson to comment on the whole exercise for BBC Radio4 Today.

In the course of a very scrappy interview it became quite clear that he didn’t like it. Not one bit. Certain things, it would seem, are ordained by God – that people who work long hours are all men and thus should be paid a lot more just for being, that the bulk of child or elderly relative care must fall upon women, that a woman who takes a career break should expect to return in a more junior role, etc. He also implied that people who work fewer hours should expect to be paid a lower hourly rate even with the same qualifications and doing the same work – the example given was a physician in general practice. Also, the figures are crude but we’ll come back to that.

Let us begin at the beginning. Employment law changes in 1970, when Barbara Castle was the Secretary of State, made clear that we were en route to equal pay. The law making that mandatory came in 1975. A small fortune was then spent on lawyers, expensive lawyers, to find or create loopholes so that bosses didn’t have to worry about abiding by the law. Far too important to worry about that, old boy! Finally a ruling by the ECHR in 1984 made it very clear that equal pay was for work of equal value. No more, no less. Trivial differences and different job titles did not count.

There has been progress since all this, led by the brighter employers ably assisted or firmly kicked by unions as required. Things got better but, again, slowly.

Come 2010 and we get the Equality Act which gathers together all the various bits of equality and anti-discrimination law. In the course of that, government took the power to demand that individual companies report how they were getting on with all this.

Years later and companies were given a year’s notice to report their current situation and answer just 4 questions – is there a difference between the pay of men and of women using median pay? And using average pay? And if you divide your workforce into four quartiles, how many men and how many women are in each? And bonuses, how much in total goes to men and how much to women?

They have all this data already for tax and national insurance purposes, as well as for the accountants. This must count as one of the simplest mathematical exercises that anyone over 15 has ever been asked to do. It just has to be input online and signed off by the CEO or senior partner. Also it applies this time around only to companies with 250 or more employees so no worries about small start-ups or niche forensic labs where the one person with a biochemistry PhD could give an outcome which looked odd. Imagine the cost of this done by civil servants.

So Peterson thinks it is crude? Yes, of course it is crude and quite deliberately so. These are very simple figures which you can generate in-house from data already on your computer. No statistician, not even an accountant required and virtually cost-free.

The thing is that each set of figures is owned by the company. They generated them and they own them. It doesn’t attempt to explain how you got there, what you need to do next. It simply says this is where you are. No philosophical arguments required, either, no-one else to blame. Hell, I thought Peterson was a psychologist and in that dimension it is very clever indeed.

Update: somewhere about 1500 firms did not report by the deadline. They will be getting a very sharp letter on Monday then it is a month’s grace or you end up in court. And overall the gender pay gap seems to be under 10% with the exercise to be repeated next year.

Some right-wingers are, of course, saying it’s not fair, it’s censorship, it’s plickal krecknis.

Williamson’s hiring in March outraged some liberals, who pointed to 2014 tweets (since deleted) in which he opined “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide” and added, when considering an appropriate punishment for women who undergo abortions, “I have hanging … in mind.”

Williamson’s firing on Thursday prompted equally-angry responses from some of his fellow conservatives in the media, who contended the move shows they are an oppressed minority — “ghettoized,” in the words of the Resurgent’s Erick Erickson.

Ghettoized by the Nazis of plickal krecknis. It will be the gas chambers next, just you wait and see.

Kevin Williamson's firing is another reminder that much of American conservatism finds itself ghettoized not by choice, but by the left's active demands that the right be silenced. Socialists, national or otherwise, don't like to compete for ideas when they can shut up others.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 5, 2018

It appears that @TheAtlantic has fired Kevin Williamson.

That was close. They almost expanded their intolerant little bubble for a brief moment. In the end, we knew they couldn’t abide employing a talented individual with – gasp – a different worldview.

— Kimberly Ross (@SouthernKeeks) April 5, 2018

Yes, “a different world view” that women should be killed for deciding to stop being pregnant. Opposing abortion rights is one thing, and advocating mass murder is another.

Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg initially defended Williamson against critics, arguing that isolated remarks on social media should not preclude Williamson from working at the magazine. The liberal watchdog Media Matters on Wednesday resurfaced a 2014 podcast that revealed Williamson’s tweets were not isolated remarks.

“I would totally go with treating it like any other crime, up to and including hanging,” Williamson said of abortion.

“I’m kind of squishy about capital punishment in general, but I’ve got a soft spot for hanging, as a form of capital punishment,” he added. “I tend to think that things like lethal injection are a little too antiseptic. … If the state is going to do violence, let’s make it violence.”

That kind of thing should just be beneath the Atlantic. There are plenty of frankly trashy outlets that are suitable for Williamson’s fantasy about killing lots of women, but the Atlantic should be better than that.

In the Atlantic’s reversal, we find one standard of civil discourse: It is okay — or, at least, forgivable — to tweet that women who undergo abortions should be hanged, so long as the tweet is hyperbolic rhetoric. It is not okay to actually think women who undergo abortions should be hanged.

No that’s not it. It is not okay to say that women who undergo abortions should be hanged and mean it. We can’t know what people actually think, we can merely know what they say and possibly whether or not they were joking or hyperbolizing when they said it.

Anyway, chalk up another win for plickal krecknis.

This just in – The Atlantic has fired Kevin Williamson, the “women who get abortions should be hanged” guy.

Kevin Williamson has been fired from The Atlantic.

From Jeffrey Goldberg's letter to staff: "The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views."

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) April 5, 2018

"The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post…Furthermore, the language used in the podcast was callous and violent. This runs contrary to The Atlantic’s tradition of respectful, well-reasoned debate, and to the values of our workplace."

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) April 5, 2018

That’s good, but why was he hired (or signed up) in the first place? It was already known that he thought and wrote that women should be executed for ending their own pregnancies. Would the Atlantic sign up a writer who had written that Jews should be murdered? Bosnians? Muslims? Atheists? Tutsis? I doubt it. It’s weird that women are apparently an exception.

It's almost like he told @TheAtlantic exactly what to expect from him and they failed to listen to his literal words and the words of all of the women who pointed them out. Go figure.

— Alyssa Leader (@alittleleader) April 5, 2018

The Daily Beast has more:

Goldberg initially defended Williamson’s hiring, dismissing the fringe view as simply “extreme tweeting” for which he deserved a “second chance.” New York Times conservative columnist Bret Stephens echoed that defense, writing, “[F]or heaven’s sake, it was a tweet.”

However, on Wednesday, Media Matters for America revealed that Williamson’s deadly solution for women who’ve had abortions wasn’t just an aberrant tweet. In a 2014 podcast, the liberal watchdog found, Williamson repeatedly and forcefully defended his view that those women should be executed.

He described current methods of execution—like lethal injection—to be “too antiseptic” and suggested that the state administer more “violent” forms of capital punishment befitting the “violence” of an abortion.

Goldberg decided that might make things awkward with female colleagues. Good call.

Allison Meier at Hyperallergic tells us about a database project to collect fugitive slave ads, which are themselves a source of information on slaves and slavery.

Readers of the May 24, 1796 Pennsylvania Gazette found an advertisement offering ten dollars to any person who would apprehend Oney Judge, an enslaved woman who had fled from President George Washington’s Virginia plantation, Mount Vernon. The notice described her in detail as a “light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy black hair,” as well as her skills at mending clothes, and that she “may attempt to escape by water … it is probable she will attempt to pass as a free woman, and has, it is said, wherewithal to pay her passage.” She did indeed board a ship called the Nancy and made it to New Hampshire, where she later married a free black sailor, although she was herself never freed by the Washingtons and remained a fugitive.

The advertisement is one of thousands that were printed in newspapers during colonial and pre-Civil War slavery in the United States. The Freedom on the Move (FOTM) public database project, now being developed at Cornell University, is the first major digital database to organize together North American fugitive slave ads from regional, state, and other collections. FOTM recently received its second of its two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) digital humanities grants.

So I went to Freedom on the Move.

Throughout the 250-year history of slavery in North America, enslaved people tried to escape. Once newspapers were common, enslavers posted “runaway ads” to try to locate these fugitives. Such ads provide significant quantities of individual and collective information about the economic, demographic, social, and cultural history of slavery, but they have never been systematically collected. We are designing and beginning data collection for a database that will compile all North American slave runaway ads and make them available for statistical, geographical, textual, and other forms of analysis. Some elements of data collection will be crowdsourced, engendering a public sense of co-participation in the process of recording history, and producing a living pedagogical tool for instructors at all levels, in multiple disciplines.

The ads of course provide a very focused and limited kind of information – the kind that would guide strangers in picking them out as “fugitive slaves.” Historians are used to that kind of thing.

Between the seventeenth century and 1865, millions of African-American people were enslaved in the thirteen colonies and the United States. One of the most common ways to resist slavery was to escape. At one point or another, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people tried to run away.

When fugitives escaped, enslavers often placed runaway notices in newspapers. Such ads included any kind of information that might help readers identify the fugitive: the name, height, build, appearance, clothing, literacy level, language, accent and so on of the runaway. Often the ads speculate on where the escapee might be headed and why, when they were most recently sold, and what kinds of scars and marks they had.

Each ad sketches the contours of an individual life, a personality, a story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concentrated, and incredibly rare source of information about a population that is notably absent from most official historical records of the time. We are fortunate that there are an estimated 100,000 or more runaway ads in newspapers that survive from the colonial and pre-Civil War U.S.

If we could collect and collate all of these ads, and make the information in them accessible, we would create what might be the single richest source of data possible for understanding the lives of the approximately eight million people who were enslaved in the history of the U.S.

This is just silly. Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair on the woke young versus the [??] old at the NY Times the night Trump won the election:

Reporters and editors were in overdrive, tearing up one historic front page for another. The story that America’s paper of record had been gearing up to tell in the coming days—months, years—was being obliterated in real time. From a journalistic perspective, that wasn’t exactly a bad thing. The new story, after all, was more fascinating, more chaotic—utterly unprecedented. And Trump’s election was the kind of Earth-shattering event that only comes around once or twice in a newsperson’s career. So for someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the dominant emotion was exhilaration about this new national epic.

Ok wait just a god damn minute. Yes, sure it was in a sense good news for journalists, but journalists are also human beings and citizens, and people with thoughts and feelings, and in many cases parents of children who will have to live many decades with whatever messes a new president may decide to make. I can believe an executive editor would be excited about the news possibilities but I can’t believe that would be the dominant emotion, no not even for the executive editor of the Times. The people at the Times have to live here. A glorious flood of stories doesn’t blot out a perpetual horror show.

But it didn’t go unnoticed that, for some in the newsroom, the journalistic mission was not exactly front of mind. “I just remember younger people with sad faces,” a person who was there told me, describing those employees as generally being in roles that are adjacent to reporting and editing. Baquet remarked to colleagues in the coming days about how surprised he was by that. “He’s thinking, We’ve got a great story on our hands,” my source said. “That was the first indication that a unified newsroom in the age of Trump was going to be a very difficult thing to achieve or maintain.”

That’s ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous. If he really did say and think that, there’s something wrong with him. You don’t even have to be on the left to see Trump as a horror show – look at Richard Painter, Bill Kristol, David Frum.

All this is by way of leading into a rather overwrought piece on the political divide at the Times that invokes the usual clichés to not much purpose.

I saw it via some tweets of Chris Stedman’s which sent me to a blog post by Jerry Coyne about the Vanity Fair piece. I very seldom read Coyne these days and I was startled at how…unpleasant he’s gotten.

Now Grania and I always have the argument that Eli referred to: whether the kids will grow out of their Control-Leftism when they enter the work force…

It’s been evident to me for about a year that the New York Times is becoming more and more aligned with the Regressive Left. This likely reflects the election of Trump, but also the currents in universities that were moving even during Obama’s time.  Just look at any front page online, and you’ll see articles conditioned and prompted by intersectionalist Leftism.

So, for example, they’ve hired Lindy West as a columnist, who, to my mind, is not only absolutely predictable in what she says, but can’t write, either. True, they did hire Bari Weiss, a Leftist who condemns the Regressive Left, but she’s been demonized not just by the RL, but by her own colleagues at The Times, as I described in a recent post.

Control-Left this, Regressive Left that – to describe anyone he doesn’t agree with, which seems to be nearly everyone. He also makes a sharp distinction between reporting facts and editorializing, which I don’t think makes a lot of sense. He takes exception to a video headline: “How Scott Pruitt’s Repeated Disregard For Ethics Is Finally Catching Up To Him.” Is it not factually true that Pruitt has broken some explicit rules and ignored many ethical norms and precedents? I suppose the headline could be worded slightly more neutrally – “Scott Pruitt Has Broken Several Ethical Rules; Now He Is Having Problems” – but I’m not sure it makes a whole lot of difference.

Coyne looks to Woodward and Bernstein for the good old just the facts reporting:

Take the Watergate affair. While the editorial page of The Washington Post was calling out the administration’s perfidy, those who ultimately brought it down, Woodward and Bernstein, were just reporting the facts. You didn’t see either of those two going on the television to call for Nixon’s impeachment. And that’s the way it should be. Journalists give the facts (granted, they can be slanted a tad; we all know the Times has a Leftist tilt), while the op-eds give us fact-based opinions.

Going on tv to call for Nixon’s or Trump’s impeachment is one thing, and giving “the facts” some context is another. Calling for impeachment or reciting the president’s activities for the day are not the only two choices. Good journalism, like good history, requires more than “just the facts.”

And then, there are the comments on Coyne’s post. He comes down like a ton of bricks on people he sees as “breaking the rules” but his rules are rather…self-serving. The first two comments are no problem at all, apparently.

38 Comments

1. 

   Matt

   Posted April 4, 2018 at 1:21 pm | Permalink

   Taking Lindy West on board is enough to sink any ship.

   Reply
   • mikeyc

     Posted April 4, 2018 at 1:56 pm | Permalink

     omg. I tried not to laugh. Really, I did.

     Reply
   • BJ

     Posted April 4, 2018 at 5:48 pm | Permalink

     Bahahahahahaha.

     Reply

Nice, huh?

Madeleine Albright was on Fresh Air yesterday to talk about her new book: Fascism: A Warning and about the fascist trend.

Albright was the first woman secretary of state. She was appointed to that position by President Bill Clinton in 1997, after having served as his U.N. ambassador. Her new book examines how fascism took hold in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Then Albright moves on to look at current authoritarian leaders in several Eastern European countries, Turkey, Russia and North Korea. One chapter is devoted to President Trump, whose election, she says, added to her sense of urgency in writing this book. Albright is now a Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.

…

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: …And part of the reason for writing it is to say that in fact this can happen in countries that have democratic systems, that have a population that’s interested in what is going on, that is supportive. Because so many of the things that have happened and happened in Czechoslovakia were steps that came as a result of ethnic issues with the German minority, but mostly steps that seemed not so terrible that there couldn’t be a deal made. And so that’s what’s so worrisome, is that these fascism can come in a way that it is one step at a time, and in many ways then goes unnoticed until it’s too late.

GROSS: One step at a time within the system?

ALBRIGHT: Within the system, and partially because it is a way of undermining democracy and the democratic institutions that are the basis of democracy, or criticizing the press or thinking that there are those that are enemies of the people and are the cause of distress or a bad economic situation. And it kind of works on the fear factor rather than the hope factor.

She talks about the fact that fascism presents different faces, so it’s easy to miss the early stages because the face is different.

GROSS: Would you just do, like, a roll call of democratic countries that you see turning authoritarian today?

ALBRIGHT: Yes. And that’s what’s so unfortunate about it because what we really do have are – in Europe, for instance, the prime example is Hungary with Viktor Orban, who is now talking about illiberal democracy, which is basically a way to deal with whoever is not, in his description, a Hungarian so he can go after immigrants. There are – then in Turkey we’re seeing a problem where in fact Erdogan, who was elected popularly, has accumulated a lot of power and wants to change the rules and the laws and the constitution in order to be able to be there longer. We have the fact that Poland is kind of mimicking what Hungary did. And then what we have in Europe also – and these are friends and allies – are other countries where there is an element of those that are taking advantage of the fear factor in some way, as I said.

For instance, in Germany, all of a sudden there’s a very far-right party that is now in the parliament. We just saw the elections in Italy, which are also parties that are on extremes are taking advantage of a particular situation. Then we have the issue in the Philippines, where Duterte thinks it’s terrific to kill drug dealers and talks about all the things that he has accomplished in that particular way. And then of course we’ve got what’s going on in Russia with Putin.

And then I have to say what I find – and this all has kind of happened since the book was written – is what in fact has happened in China with the changing of their constitution in order to make Xi Jinping be able to be a lifelong leader of a party. So there are a number of different places, but I think that the ones that really looking at what is happening in Europe and then of course in our own hemisphere, with Venezuela. That is another example of a country where initially Hugo Chavez came in as a result of the fact that the tired old men that were running the place before had not really had a relationship with the people. And then Chavez changes, and he becomes an authoritarian and, I would say, a fascist.

So, given all this variation, it becomes difficult to come up with an overarching explanation. Why is this happening in all these very different places? Add in Brexit, by the way, as Albright says later.

Albright says something generic about technology and divisions.

And then the other part of this, which I think is essential, is there is some leader at the top who takes advantage of these divisions and, in fact, exacerbates them so that the societies are more and more divided and wrangled and looking for scapegoats, which is where the immigrants come in. But mostly, this is something that’s created internally by massive changes in society and some of them due to technology.

I don’t know. I think those divisions are always there. In our case for instance…you could argue this wouldn’t have happened if The Apprentice had never happened, so how central are “the divisions” really?

GROSS: Let’s talk about what’s happening in the United States. I want to read a passage that you write in your book, “Fascism: A Warning,” a passage about President Trump. You write (reading) we’ve never had a president, at least in the modern era, whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals. Trump has spoken harshly about the institutions and principles that make up the foundation of open government.

In the process, he has systematically degraded political discourse in the U.S., shown an astonishing disregard for facts, libeled his predecessor, threatened to lock up political rivals, bullied members of his own administration, refer to mainstream journalists as enemies of the American people, spread falsehoods about the integrity of the U.S. electoral process, touted mindlessly nationalistic economic and trade policies and nurtured a paranoid bigotry toward the followers of one of the world’s foremost religions.

Do you think that President Trump has the instincts of an authoritarian leader?

ALBRIGHT: I think that he is the most anti-democratic president that we have had in modern history and that his instincts are really in that direction. And I think that that’s what worries [him]. And the passage that you read really does show that what he’s trying to do is undermine the press and has disdain for the judiciary and the electoral process and minorities. And I think that his instincts are not ones that are democratic. And he is interested basically in, I think, exacerbating those divisions that I talked about. And so I am very concerned. And basically, this is – you know, I’d written the book because I have picked up that phrase, see something, say something. And I am seeing some things that are the kinds of things that we’ve seen in other countries. And so I’m saying not only should we say something, but we have to do something about it.

I think she didn’t mean that “him” I put in brackets – it makes more sense as “me” or “us.”

Anyway…I would have put it a lot more firmly, but then I’m not a former government official. Of course Trump has the instincts of an authoritarian leader; there’s no question about it. He makes a display of them every day.

A little vignette of what it’s like to play at Being the Government with Trump in the room – a slice from a longer piece about ogod ogod it’s chaos he’s so nuts he blows off everything anyone suggests to him ogod ogod.

And now, the little vignette:

Aides often become frustrated with the President’s short attention span. One official described Trump as frequently meandering from the topic at hand in meetings, particularly if he believes the positions being aired by his advisers differ from his own point of view. He’ll stall sessions with non-sequiturs, complaining at random about Amazon’s tax status or proclaiming that he’s only visited Russia once, for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.

We all know that guy, right? It can be a relative, it can be an acquaintance, it can be a guy who corners you at a party – but we all know that guy. We know that guy who is numbingly voluble yet has nothing to say. We know that guy who obsesses weirdly over three or four outrages and never makes any progress.

It sounds Alzheimersy and it may be, but it may be just one of those empty-headed but nevertheless opinionated and talkative dudes who are always busy explaining something to somebody somewhere.

In Mueller news – he does have the authority to investigate the things he’s investigating.

Paul Manafort’s legal strategy for evading the charges filed against him by special counsel Robert Mueller was fairly straightforward. His attorneys argued, among other things, that many of the charges Manafort faces — which include fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy — are largely outside the scope of Mueller’s authority. After all, Mueller was appointed to investigate collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 race. What does Manafort’s allegedly having laundered money by buying real estate in Brooklyn have to do with any of that?

Trump fans have been saying that, noisily all along. Problem: it’s not true.

Late Monday night, Mueller’s team answered, in the form of a 53-page response to Manafort’s motion to dismiss the charges. Not only did Mueller explain why he had the authority to prosecute Manafort for alleged financial crimes, but, in a footnote, he explained why he also has the authority to investigate any attempts to obstruct his probe — including, presumably, by the president of the United States.

Short version: Rosenstein said so back in May when Mueller was appointed.

When he was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in May (after Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recusal from any investigations involving the 2016 presidential campaign), Rosenstein issued a public outline of the scope of Mueller’s authority. We’ve walked through this before; it includes three main things:

• “Any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.”
• “Any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”
• “Any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).”

That section of the Code of Federal Regulations — 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a) — allows Mueller to investigate “federal crimes committed in the course of, and with intent to interfere with, the Special Counsel’s investigation,” including lying to authorities.

Matters that may arise directly from the investigation. Manafort’s matter done ariz.

But the response memo also reveals that Rosenstein issued a confidential memo in August detailing areas that Mueller had the authority to investigate. Among those were specific allegations involving “crimes arising out of payments he received from the Ukrainian government before and during the tenure of President Viktor Yanukovych.” Those payments are at the heart of the indictments filed against Manafort. The allegation is that he laundered the money he received and didn’t properly report its receipt or his advocacy for Ukraine.

And there’s more. Mueller’s got permission piled on permission. Trump fans can’t scream it out of existence.