Trump pretends to know what “disgraceful” means

Dec 15th, 2017 12:02 pm | By

Trump is attempting to convince us all that he gets to fire Mueller and pardon Flynn and go on his way rejoicing.

President Trump said Friday there is tremendous anger over what he called the FBI’s “disgraceful’’ behavior, taking aim at the bureau just before he appeared at its training facility to praise the nation’s police officers.

“It’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI,’’ the president told reporters as he prepared to depart the White House for a ceremony at the FBI’s National Academy in Quantico, Va., where more than 200 law enforcement officers graduated from a program that imparts FBI expertise and standards.

“We’re going to rebuild the FBI, it’ll be bigger and better than ever, but it is very sad when you look at those documents, and how they’ve done that is really, really disgraceful, and you have a lot of very angry people that are seeing it,’’ Trump said.

Nah. Far more people think Trump is disgraceful.

Mind you, the FBI has plenty of disgrace in its history. But what Trump is talking about? Nah.

Trump appeared on a stage there alongside FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whointroduced the president by calling him “our nation’s highest law enforcement official.’’ That title carries possible implications for the ongoing criminal probe into whether Trump attempted to obstruct justice leading up to the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey in May.

The president’s defenders say that, as the nation’s top law enforcement official, he cannot obstruct justice by firing the head of the FBI. However, in past administrations that phrase has been used to describe the attorney general, not the president.

Plus lawyers have been lining up to say no that claim is ludicrous and wrong.

Just another routine day in Trump.

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The rot at the core

Dec 14th, 2017 1:28 pm | By

It’s not so much about sex as it is about work, Rebecca Traister points out.

[I]n the midst of our great national calculus, in which we are determining what punishments fit which sexual crimes, it’s possible that we’re missing the bigger picture altogether: that this is not, at its heart, about sex at all — or at least not wholly. What it’s really about is work, and women’s equality in the workplace, and more broadly, about the rot at the core of our power structures that makes it harder for women to do work because the whole thing is tipped toward men.

It’s like dogs pissing on the shrubbery. “This is ours.” You can leave the house if you insist, but then we’re gonna piss on you. These recent accounts have been about the workplace.

We got to where we are because men, specifically white men, have been afforded a disproportionate share of power. That leaves women dependent on those men — for economic security, for work, for approval, for any share of power they might aspire to. Many of the women who have told their stories have explained that they did not do so before because they feared for their jobs. When women did complain, many were told that putting up with these behaviors was just part of working for the powerful men in question — “That’s just Charlie being Charlie”; “That’s just Harvey being Harvey.” Remaining in the good graces of these men, because they were the bosses, the hosts, the rainmakers, the legislators, was the only way to preserve employment, and not just their own: Whole offices, often populated by female subordinates, are dependent on the steady power of the male bosses.

In workplaces like that, a sexual overture is never just a sexual overture. It can’t be.

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Bang, another target down

Dec 14th, 2017 12:16 pm | By

Say goodbye to net neutrality in the US.

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle landmark rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies power to potentially reshape Americans’ online experiences.

The agency scrapped so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone services.

The action reversed the agency’s 2015 decision, during the Obama administration, to better protect Americans as they have migrated to the internet for most communications.

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the commission, said the rollback of the rules would eventually help consumers because

blah blah blah the usual shit but we know he doesn’t mean a word of it.

The five commissioners were fiercely divided along party lines. In front of a room packed with reporters and television cameras from major networks, the two Democratic commissioners warned of consumer harms to come from the changes.

Mignon Clyburn, one of the Democratic commissioners who voted against the action, presented two accordion folders full of letters in protest to the changes, and accused the three Republican commissioners of defying the wishes of millions of Americans.

“I dissent, because I am among the millions outraged,” said Ms. Clyburn. “Outraged, because the F.C.C. pulls its own teeth, abdicating responsibility to protect the nation’s broadband consumers.”

Tough, because Trump.

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A worldview that suggests there is no such thing as a line

Dec 14th, 2017 11:17 am | By

Dahlia Lithwick on being both victim and accomplice of one of those men.

She first met Judge Alex Kozinski in 1996, when she was clerking for another judge. She doesn’t remember what they talked about but she does remember “feeling quite small and very dirty.”

Without my prompting, my former co-clerk described this interaction in an email to me this week. “He completely ignored me and appeared to be undressing you with his eyes,” he wrote. “I had never seen anyone ogle another person like that and still have not seen anything like it. Was so uncomfortable to watch, and I wasn’t even the subject of the stare.”

Later she had occasion to talk to him on the phone and he asked her what she was wearing.

For the 20 intervening years, I have promised myself that if Judge Kozinski was ever to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, I would testify about the dozens of conversations I’d had over the years with other clerks and lawyers about Kozinski’s behavior, about the strange hypersexualized world of transgressive talk and action that embodied his chambers. It turns out, it didn’t take a confirmation hearing to kick off this conversation. On Dec. 8, the Washington Postpublished the stories of six women—two of them, Heidi Bondand Emily Murphy, brave enough to go on the record—alleging that Kozinski had harassed them when they clerked or otherwise worked for him, or when they clerked for another 9th Circuit judge. Bond says Kozinski pulled up pornography on a computer in his chambers and asked if it aroused her. One accuser spoke of him looking “her body up and down ‘in a less-than-professional way.’ ” Another reported about his fixation on the idea that she should exercise naked.

In a statement to the Post, Kozinski said, “I have been a judge for 35 years and during that time have had over 500 employees in my chambers. I treat all of my employees as family and work very closely with most of them. I would never intentionally do anything to offend anyone and it is regrettable that a handful have been offended by something I may have said or done.”

Sigh.

There’s family and family; there’s work closely and work closely. Claiming one would never intentionally do anything to offend anyone is weaselly, because intentions are only as good as they are. Millions of men have apparently made zero effort to understand how women in general tend to feel about sexual overtures in the workplace, and in that context “intentionally” really doesn’t mean much. It’s possible for instance to insult people without exactly intending to, but maybe there’s an attention or effort or generosity gap there. And speaking of that, “it is regrettable that a handful have been offended” is remarkably insulting as well as callous. He doesn’t know it’s only a handful. You’d think “#MeToo” would have taught people that by now.

And the guy’s a judge. Wouldn’t you think judges would have a better understanding of power differentials than that?

But Lithwick finds it hard to put a name to what he did.

In so many of his interactions with me, and conversations around me, Judge Kozinski has always gone one step over the line of appropriate sexual discourse. At the same time, he pushes a worldview that suggests there is no such thing as a line. Both personally and in his jurisprudence, I don’t think he believes that porn is porn, or that sex talk is problematic in the workplace. His acts of darting back and forth into deep sexual taboo became a natural experiment in who would live there with him. But because he is powerful, and because relationships with him are proximate to yet more power, those in his circle got dragged along into a world that diminishes and belittles women. For more evidence of this, you can read this diary entry he wrote for Slate in 1996, describing an outing with an unnamed clerk to attend a lingerie party.

He’s “sex positive” and he’s casting the “handful” who were “offended” as sex negative aka prudes.

Lithwick regrets not speaking up before.

I have seen Judge Kozinski dozens of times in the past two decades, moderated his panels, sat next to him at high-powered, high-status events and dinners. My husband will tell you he once fielded a call from the judge to my home, in which Kozinski described himself as my “paramour.” I have, on every single such occasion, been aware that part of his open flouting of empathy or care around gender was a show of juvenile, formulaic bad-assery designed to co-opt you into the bargain. We all ended up colluding to pretend that this was all funny or benign, and that, since everyone knew about it, it must be OK. It never was.

Much of bro culture is about exactly that – a show of juvenile, formulaic bad-assery that casts dissenters as prudes.

But now it’s 2017, and along with thinking about Heidi Bond, Emily Murphy, and those who came forward anonymously, I am also thinking about those who opted not to apply for clerkships with him, sidestepping an opportunity to get within close range of a coveted Supreme Court clerkship. Like others who have now come forward, I had told young female law students not to clerk for him.

I am thinking about the hundreds of plaintiffs in the discrimination and harassment suits he heard in the years he was on the bench. I am thinking of all the ways in which “open secrets” become their own spheres of truth, in which the idea that “everybody knew” something awful absolved all of us of the burden of doing anything. The former Kozinski and 9th Circuit clerks I’ve spoken to in recent days feel heartsick, as I do, that for the sake of our own careers and professional legitimacy we continued to go to the dinners and moderate the panels, all the while hoping this story would break someday and we’d be off the hook. Some of these clerks are still encumbered by the norms that constrained Bond, norms that stipulate that clerks must not speak out against or question their judges, norms to which Kozinski insisted strict adherence—and norms that, it must be said, are insane on their face if they prevent reports of open sexual harassment.

Do read the whole piece. Read it two or three times. It’s tragic and depressing and true, so read it over and over.

For years, I excused myself because I believed that the casual degradation of women that emanated from Judge Kozinski’s orbit was the death rattle of an old America: a symbol of the sad, broken longing for the world of Mad Men, a world that ended as soon as women reached parity with men in law school. Donald Trump and his foot soldiers are proof that this old America is very much alive, and that it’s in fact a full-scale project to treat women as trivial and ornamental and to hold them back. It keeps brilliant women from accessing power and dismisses other brilliant women as hysterics—the “nutty and slutty” character assassination used to trash Anita Hill. It’s disturbing to realize that, even today, the main markers I relied on to confirm Kozinski’s bad behavior were the shocked reactions of normal, good men: my husband, my friend, my co-clerk. Sure, I felt dirty after each interaction, but my feelings didn’t feel like enough.

We’re told so often and so loudly that they’re not.

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All about him

Dec 14th, 2017 10:34 am | By

The Post has a big think piece on Trump’s completely self-centered attitude to the Russia question. On the one hand yo, national security, rival power, hostile rival power; on the other hand, me me me me ME me me.

The result is without obvious parallel in U.S. history, a situation in which the personal insecurities of the president — and his refusal to accept what even many in his administration regard as objective reality — have impaired the government’s response to a national security threat. The repercussions radiate across the government.

Rather than search for ways to deter Kremlin attacks or safeguard U.S. elections, Trump has waged his own campaign to discredit the case that Russia poses any threat and he has resisted or attempted to roll back efforts to hold Moscow to account.

Because it’s insulting to him and diminishes his Triumph, and that outweighs the rather larger issue of who and what Putin is and what kind of society he presides over and what kind of society he will allow us to have and whether we want him deciding our elections for us.

To put it another way, the personal insecurities of the president should be entirely beside the point on an issue of this magnitude, yet they are central. The giant narcissism of one Giant Baby could ruin everything in a way even the megalomania of Hitler failed to do.

White House officials cast the president’s refusal to acknowledge Russian interference in the election as an understandably human reaction. “The president obviously feels . . . that the idea that he’s been put into office by Vladi­mir Putin is pretty insulting,” said a second senior administration official.

Jesus christ. This isn’t fucking high school. It doesn’t matter what the president feels is “insulting” to his precious Self. Nobody should care what he “feels” about it. (It’s usually the hard right that is scornful of Feelings; I guess Trump is the One Great Exception.)

Meanwhile, the Russians feel good about it. It didn’t cost much and it has made the US a joke.

The Russian operation seemed intended to aggravate political polarization and racial tensions and to diminish U.S. influence abroad. The United States’ closest alliances are frayed, and the Oval Office is occupied by a disruptive politician who frequently praises his counterpart in Russia.

What’s not to like?

U.S. officials declined to discuss whether the stream of recent intelligence on Russia has been shared with Trump. Current and former officials said that his daily intelligence update — known as the president’s daily brief, or PDB — is often structured to avoid upsetting him.

Ponder that little bombshell. His daily intelligence update is often structured to avoid upsetting him.

Russia-related intelligence that might draw Trump’s ire is in some cases included only in the written assessment and not raised orally, said a former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter.

Which, the Post neglects to spell out, means he’ll never be aware of it, because he doesn’t read. He’s that incompetent for the job. (Bush was close to that incompetent for the job. He demanded and got very short briefings, because he too dislikes reading.)

The allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, which the president has denied categorically, also contribute to his resistance to endorse the intelligence, another senior White House official said. Acknowledging Russian interference, Trump believes, would give ammunition to his critics.

Still others close to Trump explain his aversion to the intelligence findings in more psychological terms. The president, who burns with resentment over perceived disrespect from the Washington establishment, sees the Russia inquiry as a conspiracy to undermine his election accomplishment — “a witch hunt,” as he often calls it.

“If you say ‘Russian interference,’ to him it’s all about him,” said a senior Republican strategist who has discussed the matter with Trump’s confidants. “He judges everything as about him.”

It’s a loop that he’s caught in. If you’re that entangled in your own ego you can’t get interested in what’s outside your own ego, so you get only more entangled in your own ego, and on it goes.

All this was perfectly obvious before he was elected. I will never understand why the danger of it was not equally obvious.

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The war continues

Dec 13th, 2017 5:08 pm | By

Meanwhile Congressional Republicans are also pretending to think Mueller is a Secret Agent for The Democrats Plus The Devil Plus The King of the Mooslims.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein adamantly defended the character and impartiality of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, as he came head-to-head on Wednesday with an increasingly aggressive campaign by Republicans to discredit the inquiry.

The Republicans’ effort received a fresh jolt from the release one night earlier of text messages exchanged last year between an F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok, and an F.B.I. lawyer, Lisa Page, describing the possibility of an election victory by President Trump as “terrifying” and saying that Hillary Clinton “just has to win.” Mr. Mueller removed Mr. Strzok from the Russia investigation as soon as he learned of the texts, a step that Mr. Rosenstein praised.

But is that political? Or is it because Trump is the most disgusting person in the world? That’s the thing about Trump: the horror of him goes way beyond the political, even though the political is certainly included. He’s a terrible person in every perceptible way, and he’s in a position to do damage we quail from itemizing. He terrifies plenty of Republicans.

“The public trust in this whole thing is gone,” said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, summing up sentiments among his party. “It seems to me there are two things you can do: You can disband the Mueller special prosecutor, and you can do what we’ve all called for and appoint a second special counsel to look into this.”

But the swelling campaign to undermine Mr. Mueller’s investigation, which has dominated conservative media for days, appeared to have little effect on Mr. Rosenstein, who oversees Mr. Mueller. Mr. Rosenstein said he would only fire Mr. Mueller if he had cause under Justice Department regulations — and he said nothing that has happened so far met that standard.

There’s no low they won’t happily stoop to.

Republicans repeatedly pressed Mr. Rosenstein to appoint a second special counsel to investigate political partisanship in the department in its handling of the Trump-Russia investigation or in last year’s decision not to charge Mrs. Clinton with a crime over her use of a private email server while secretary of state — an idea that has been promoted heavily by commentators on Fox News and elsewhere in recent days.

Fox News is running the country now. Not informing the people who run the country along with the citizens who vote for them, but just plain running the damn country. It’s so pathetic.

Mr. Mueller, a registered Republican appointed by President George W. Bush to direct the F.B.I., has long had critics in the most pro-Trump corners of the House and the conservative news media. But in recent weeks, as his investigation has delivered a series of indictments to high-profile associates of the president and evidence that at least two of them are cooperating with the inquiry, those critics have grown louder and in numbers.

So the more criminal Trump appears to be, the harder Fox and Co try to protect him. I see.

Democrats say the pattern is becoming clear: As Mr. Mueller moves closer to Mr. Trump’s inner circle, Republicans try to discredit federal law enforcement and undercut the eventual findings of the special counsel. The Republican effort may also be intended to blunt the political repercussions should Mr. Mueller be fired, Democrats say.

Representative Jerrold Nadler, the Judiciary Committee’s senior Democrat, called the new Republican demands “wildly dangerous” to American institutions.

“I understand the instinct to want to give cover to the president,” he said. “I am fearful that the majority’s effort to turn the tables on the special counsel will get louder and more frantic as the walls continue to close in around the president.”

Perhaps more portentous is the restive Senate, a less partisan body where Mr. Mueller’s appointment in May was greeted with relief. Skepticism about the special counsel’s investigation is starting to take root there, too.

It’s sickening and alarming.

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There is a cleansing needed

Dec 13th, 2017 4:44 pm | By

The liars at Fox News are trying to provide cover for Trump to fire Mueller.

[I]n Fox’s alternate universe, the investigation is “illegitimate and corrupt,” or so says Gregg Jarrett, a legal analyst who appears regularly on Mr. Hannity’s nightly exercise in presidential ego-stroking. “Mueller’s stooges literally are doing everything within their power, and then some, to try and remove President Trump from office,” Mr. Hannity said last Wednesday.

“What a total travesty! They should all step aside,” Ms. Ingraham said last week, almost gleefully, about the supposed conflicts of interest permeating the special counsel’s highly experienced team of investigators. “Including Bob Mueller.”

How do they manage to convince themselves that of the two parties involved, Mueller is the corrupt and dishonest one? Trump’s squalid history is on the record for anyone to see. Republican is one thing, and rooting for corruption and fraud and lying and cheating is another. Just check out Richard Painter on Twitter to see that.

Perhaps the most inflammatory rhetoric has come from Ms. Pirro, the host of “Justice With Judge Jeanine” and a “presidential favorite,” according to The Times. “There is a cleansing needed in our F.B.I. and Department of Justice,” Ms. Pirro said Saturday, in her most unhinged rant yet. “It needs to be cleansed of individuals who should not just be fired but who need to be taken out in handcuffs.”

Ms. Pirro named, among others, James Comey, the former F.B.I. director (“so political, so corrupt”); Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s deputy director, apparently in the tank for Hillary Clinton; and Peter Strzok, a top counterintelligence agent whom Mr. Mueller removed from the investigation after learning of private text messages he sent in 2016 criticizing Mr. Trump and praising Mrs. Clinton.

Topping her list of outlaws was, of course, Mr. Mueller, who she said “can’t come up with one piece of evidence!” Maybe she just forgot about the indictments and guilty pleas? Ms. Pirro, a former New York prosecutor and judge, didn’t allege any actual crimes, just that Mr. Mueller and his people are guilty of “attempting to destroy Trump.”

It would be one thing if Ms. Pirro were only spouting off on television. But she is a friend of Mr. Trump’s and has met privately with him and his top advisers to sell her half-cocked theories. After Mr. Trump’s victory last year, she interviewed to be his deputy attorney general, a job that would have empowered her to fire Mr. Mueller on her own.

To put it mildly, this is insane. The primary purpose of Mr. Mueller’s investigation is not to take down Mr. Trump. It’s to protect America’s national security and the integrity of its elections by determining whether a presidential campaign conspired with a foreign adversary to influence the 2016 election — a proposition that grows more plausible every day.

If only the adults could take over from the tantrumming children.

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When the votes from Selma and surrounding Dallas County came in

Dec 13th, 2017 12:44 pm | By

Being an unabashed racist isn’t always a winning strategy.

According to CNN exit polling, 30 percent of the electorate was African-American, with 96 percent of them voting for Mr. Jones. A remarkable 98 percent of black women voters supported Mr. Jones. The share of black voters Tuesday was higher than the share in 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama was on the ballot.

That’s despite the obstacles created since Shelby v Holder.

Michael Nabors, 54, and his wife, Ella, 55, were among the black voters soaking up the Democratic good cheer after news agencies called the race for Mr. Jones.

“We knew the world was looking at us,” he said.

Mr. Nabors said that black voters were paying attention to Mr. Moore’s comments in September, in which he said that America was last “great” during the days when slavery was legal. He said they paid attention when Mr. Moore brought Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser, to campaign for him. He said that they paid attention to the allegations brought by the women who said Mr. Moore had consorted with them when they were young.

And he said they paid attention to Mr. Jones’s most famous case as a prosecutor.

And then there was Selma.

When the votes from Selma and surrounding Dallas County came in just a little after 10 pm, Moore’s lead began to evaporate. On CNN, John King announced, “Selma just put Doug Jones back into the race.”

A county where African Americans make up 70 percent of the population gave 75 percent of the vote to Doug Jones. That brought the Democrat 7,000 votes closer to victory. And as more votes from more predominately African-American counties came in, Jones moved into the lead. Within a half hour, the networks were announcing that a Democrat had won an Alabama Senate contest for the first time in almost a quarter-century.

Jones needed all the votes that he got Tuesday. He won by a narrow margin—prevailing by a bit more than 20,000 votes out of roughly 1.3 million cast. But he could not have gotten near the finish line without the overwhelming support that he received from Alabama’s African-American voters in general, and from African-American women voters in particular.

“We have come so far,” Doug Jones said in his victory speech.

Everyone knew what he meant.

Just as everyone knew what it meant when Selma put Doug Jones into the race.

Hold on. Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.

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Birmingham

Dec 13th, 2017 11:36 am | By

Going back into the archives, the NY Times in April 2001.

With the families of four black girls watching solemnly from the front row, prosecutors opened the long-delayed murder trial of Thomas E. Blanton Jr. today by depicting him as a rabid segregationist who helped dynamite the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 and then insisted for years on driving obsessively past the scene of the crime.

Doug Jones, the United States attorney here, took jurors back in time to a Birmingham where efforts to desegregate schools and lunch counters met with determined and often violent resistance from whites, including Mr. Blanton and other members of his Ku Klux Klan cell who plotted in the darkness under a Cahaba River bridge.

”There were people, and Thomas E. Blanton was one of them,” Mr. Jones said in his opening statement, ”who saw their segregated way of life dissolving and couldn’t stand it.”

Doug Jones carried Birmingham by a wide margin yesterday.

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One of our attorneys is a Jew

Dec 13th, 2017 10:34 am | By

That was fun.

Doug Jones, a Democratic former prosecutor who mounted a seemingly quixotic Senate campaign in the face of Republican dominance here, defeated his scandal-scarred opponent, Roy S. Moore, after a brutal campaign marked by accusations of sexual abuse and child molestation against the Republican.

The upset delivered an unimagined victory for Democrats and shaved Republicans’ unstable Senate majority to a single seat.

But better than that, it’s a smack in the face to President Pussygrabber and Steve Wifebeater Bannon.

The abandonment of Mr. Moore by affluent white voters, along with strong support from black voters, proved decisive, allowing Mr. Jones to transcend Alabama’s rigid racial polarization and assemble a winning coalition.

Despite all those closed voting precincts and DMV offices in mostly-black counties.

Bannon helped.

Mr. Moore, instead of facing questions about accusations of sexual abuse, largely vanished from the campaign in the last week. He returned to Alabama for a rally in the rural, southeast corner of the state on Monday with Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist.

But the most memorable comments from the event did not come from Mr. Moore. Rather, they emerged from Mr. Bannon, who mocked the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, a University of Alabama graduate, for not attending a more prestigious school; Mr. Moore’s wife, Kayla, who angrily denied charges the couple was anti-Semitic by noting “one of our attorneys is a Jew;” and an Army friend of the candidate, who recalled the two of them being uneasy walking into a Vietnam brothel to find “pretty girls” whom Mr. Moore found too young.

Happy Hanukkah.

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Curlicues

Dec 12th, 2017 4:19 pm | By

A thing happening in Oxford:

The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries is set to open a new exhibition looking at some of the earliest examples of English graphic design.

On display at the Weston Library from next month, Designing English: Graphics on the Medieval Page will largely showcase the work of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval scribes, painters and engravers dating from the fifth to the 15th century.

Last time I was at the Bodleian (which was a long time ago) I think I bought just about every postcard they had with medieval graphic design on it.

I just wanted to share the illustration Design Week chose:

Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

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Defending the tweet during her daily press briefing

Dec 12th, 2017 4:10 pm | By

They’ll defend anything. Sanders will defend anything. Trump could eat a toddler on live tv and she would say “Look, the president is always going to be somebody who has a big appetite.”

“There’s no way that this is sexist at all,” said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, defending the tweet during her daily press briefing Tuesday afternoon. “Look, the president is always going to be somebody who responds,” she also said. “We’ve said that many times before.”

Look, that’s such a vacuous thing to say. Look, you can’t just brush aside loathsome sexist and racist tweets and remarks by saying he’s always going to be sexist and racist. Look, you can’t just blithely excuse everything by telling us what we already know, which is that Trump is a guy who does shit like this. We know he is; that’s the point – he’s a terrible human being and a disgrace to the country.

Of the five senators who at the time of Trump’s tweet had called for the president to resign, Gillibrand was the only woman. She was also the only one he went after on Twitter.

But Sanders insisted that has nothing to do with Gillibrand’s gender. “This is simply talking about a system that we have that is broken in which special interests control our government and I don’t think that there’s probably many people that are more controlled by political contributions than the senator the president referenced,” Sanders said, expanding on the president’s tweet with a more serious charge.

Ironically, it’s true that we have a broken system and that corporate interests control our government, but the implication that Trump opposes that is laughable.

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Enough

Dec 12th, 2017 11:17 am | By

BBC World anchor Katty Kay in DC:

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Would do anything

Dec 12th, 2017 10:48 am | By

President Piggy’s carrying on is even international news. The BBC is reporting it, with “slut shaming” in the headline.

US President Donald Trump has been accused of trying to “slut shame” a female senator who demanded he quit over sexual misconduct claims.

Mr Trump claimed Kirsten Gillibrand had come “begging” to him for campaign donations and “would do anything” for cash.

Senator Elizabeth Warren said the president was “trying to bully, intimidate and slut-shame” her fellow Democrat.

Yes she did.

In Tuesday morning’s tweet, the US president accused Ms Gillibrand of being a lackey to Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer.

“Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump,” the US president posted.

Mr Trump did not explain what he meant by “do anything” for campaign contributions.

Wink wink nudge nudge.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a frequent critic of the president, tweeted that “America must reject Trump’s sexist slurs”.

The only way to do that is to reject Trump. Let’s do that.

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Way to fire us up

Dec 12th, 2017 10:33 am | By

There’s nothing quite like a rich white ignorant talentless man in a position of maximum power telling women to shut up for making women get EVEN LOUDER.

That’s especially true when he’s a rich white ignorant talentless man with a long history of assaulting and insulting women.

It’s especially true when he’s a rich white ignorant talentless man with a long history of assaulting and insulting women who are orders of magnitude more intelligent and better informed and more ethically aware than he is.

President Trump forcefully entered the national debate about sexual harassment on Tuesday, again dismissing his own accusers as fabricating their stories and saying that a prominent Democratic senator, a woman, “would do anything” for campaign contributions and calling her a “lightweight.”

The president’s attacks came in early morning Twitter posts after several of the accusers had come forward on Monday to renew their charges that Mr. Trump had sexually assaulted them before he was president. His Twitter attack also came after the senator, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, had called for him to resign.

By inserting himself directly into the discussion, the president ensured that calls for revived scrutiny over the women’s allegations would gain new energy and prominence.

Go on, President Pussygrabber, insult us some more. We’ll sink our fangs into your ankles so hard a crowbar can’t get us off you.

Gillibrand briskly pointed out that Trump’s tweet was a sexist smear.

The president was pointed in his criticism of Ms. Gillibrand, saying she “would do anything” for campaign contributions, without providing details about what he meant.

Oh, you know – the usual – blow jobs for drunken sailors, that kind of thing.

On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Trump ignored a shouted question from a reporter about what he meant in his Twitter post.

Coward. Weasel. He can say anything on Twitter, but in person he just scowls and ignores.

“In his tweets, whether intentionally or not, Donald Trump cues these gendered beliefs that women are less capable (or “lightweight”) and that ambition in women is something to be maligned,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for Women and Politics at Rutgers University, in an emailed message.

Of course it’s intentionally. Don’t be giving him wiggle room. He doesn’t trip on a White House carpet and accidentally tweet that Gillibrand is a lightweight. (I know, that’s not what she meant. She meant that he says these things from his foul id and may not be consciously aware of how coded they are. I know. But it’s one of those things where you don’t get to plead ignorance as an excuse. His foul id is reekingly sexist and it knows what it’s doing, even if Definitely Disgusting Donnie doesn’t.)

Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster, said Mr. Trump was following his playbook by going “full force against accusers.”

“I think he’s worse with women but he just throws every insult that he can possibly throw,” she said. “That ‘would do anything to get elected’ is fairly ominous — it can be taken in a way that is very suggestive, and I think that is obviously horrible.”

She said that the political climate had changed and that there was no returning to a time when sexual harassment was tolerated. “Having a president who attacks other women for how they look or suggests that they are sexually promiscuous or liars, it’s going to hurt the party over all,” Ms. Matthews said.

Is it? When?

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The shame of a nation

Dec 12th, 2017 10:07 am | By

Donald Trump on whatever popped into his head:

Why is he suddenly starting almost every word with a Capital Letter?

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The birthplace of the Voting Rights Act

Dec 12th, 2017 9:49 am | By

Ari Berman on Alabama and voting rights:

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He fell asleep while interviewing her

Dec 11th, 2017 4:42 pm | By

Lucinda Franks started out as a journalist in the 1970s. It wasn’t easy.

Two years after I joined the news service, I won the Pulitzer Prize. I suffered for it mightily. That I was the first woman to win for national reporting — I had been brought to New York to do a five-part series on the violent antiwar Weatherman group — made it only worse. I could see it in their bowed heads: We’ve been striving for years to win that coveted prize and a 24-year-old walks away with it! The entire bureau of men refused to speak to me that day and the days after.

I was haunted by the creeping conviction that I didn’t deserve the prize — I should give it back. For at least the next 10 years, I was too ashamed to tell people I’d won.

Isn’t that nice?

When you get older, gender discrimination gets easier, somewhat predictable and sometimes even funny. But it doesn’t stop — even if you’ve published four books and had a long journalism career. When my last book came out, I was interviewed by a certain talk show host, before he was stripped of his job because of gross sexual misconduct charges. I had hardly opened my mouth before he fell asleep. During the rest of the interview, he kept nodding off while the camera judiciously avoided him. When I left the studio, he had popped awake for his new guests. I saw him waving his hands enthusiastically while speaking with two high-powered male journalists.

Charlie Rose, no doubt. He’s pretty soporific himself.

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What is truth, said jesting Pilate

Dec 11th, 2017 4:21 pm | By

Sarah Huckabee Sanders says dang it reporters need to stop making mistakes and be way more careful to tell the truth.

She and Jim Acosta of CNN argued about it.

Sanders: When journalists make honest mistakes, they should own up to them.

Acosta: They do.

Sanders: Sometimes, and a lot of times you don’t.

[Crosstalk]

Sanders: I’m sorry, I’m not finished. There’s a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people. Something that happens regularly —

(Actually she said “purposely,” which is the right word. Erik Wemple either misheard or thought it was the wrong word and silently corrected it.)

[Crosstalk]

Sanders: I’m not done. You cannot say that it’s an honest mistake when you’re purposely putting out information that you know to be false. Or when you’re taking information that hasn’t been validated, that hasn’t been offered any credibility and that has been continually denied by a number of people including people with direct knowledge of an incident.

It’s so…striking that she’s so concerned with truth when the president she works for is such a chronic shameless liar.

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“If you’re too sorry or lazy”

Dec 11th, 2017 3:41 pm | By

Speaking of Alabama, and voting, and voting rights, and Shelby v Holder, and voting rights, and voting rights, and voting rights…

This time last year, Alabama’s chief elections official landed in the national spotlight for delivering a screed against nonvoters that many people interpreted as an attack on African Americans in the state, who have long faced barriers to voting. “If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear and to go register to vote, or to register electronically, and then to go vote, then you don’t deserve that privilege,” Republican John Merrill said in an interview with documentary filmmaker Brian Jenkins. Jenkins had asked why he opposed automatically registering Alabamians when they reach voting age, and his response sizzled with anger toward people who “think they deserve the right because they’ve turned 18.” So he made a pledge: “As long as I’m secretary of state of Alabama, you’re going to have to show some initiative to become a registered voter in this state.”

“If you’re too sorry or lazy to get up off of your rear”…yeah that’s about as clear a dog whistle as you could ask for. That’s not meant to conjure up a mental image of sorry lazy white people.

And he’s been doing what he promised, too.

When the votes are tallied Tuesday night, what won’t be counted is how many people might have voted if not for the restrictive voting laws in place in the state. In a close election, the actions of Merrill and the GOP could help elect Moore.

Well that’s the point, isn’t it. Exclude as many black people as possible and elect racist shitheads.

In recent years, Alabama Republicans have taken steps to protect their grip on power by making it harder for African Americans and Latinos to vote. They passed a law requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID, a measure that has been found to disproportionately disenfranchise African Americans and Latinos, who are more likely to lack such an ID and face impediments to getting one. The ID law also applied to absentee voting, which is used by many elderly black voters in rural counties, who now must mail in copies of their photo IDs with their ballots. 

In rural counties, where there aren’t shops with copy machines on every corner – where, in fact, the nearest copy machine is probably a long drive away. That’ll block a lot of votes!

They reformed campaign finance laws to weaken the political organizations that mobilize African American voters. They closed 31 DMV offices across the state, disproportionately affecting rural majority-black counties.

Since Shelby v Holder Alabama has closed about 200 voting precincts, making it a bigger pain to vote in the ones that remain.

White supremacy isn’t dead yet.

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