He hates us, precious

Oct 11th, 2017 4:00 pm | By

Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair says the wheels are coming off. It’s seemed that way all along, but at the same time it’s also been steadily getting worse.

He says Corker’s interview with the Times

brought into the open what several people close to the president have recently told me in private: that Trump is “unstable,” “losing a step,” and “unraveling.”

The conversation among some of the president’s longtime confidantes, along with the character of some of the leaks emerging from the White House has shifted. There’s a new level of concern…

In recent days, I spoke with a half dozen prominent Republicans and Trump advisers, and they all describe a White House in crisis as advisers struggle to contain a president who seems to be increasingly unfocused and consumed by dark moods. Trump’s ire is being fueled by his stalled legislative agenda and, to a surprising degree, by his decision last month to back the losing candidate Luther Strange in the Alabama Republican primary. “Alabama was a huge blow to his psyche,” a person close to Trump said. “He saw the cult of personality was broken.”

I hope it’s true. He has no theory of mind, though, so I’m not sure he’s capable of seeing that the cult of personality is broken. He thinks he’s awesome so he thinks everyone thinks he’s awesome, because everyone thinks what he things, because what else is there?

According to two sources familiar with the conversation, Trump vented to his longtime security chief, Keith Schiller, “I hate everyone in the White House! There are a few exceptions, but I hate them!” (A White House official denies this.)

Could be a new ratchet – or could just be more of the same.



It’s frankly disgusting

Oct 11th, 2017 3:46 pm | By

Press conference, Oval Office. Justin Trudeau and the fucking moron answered questions. Trump said he thinks it’s frankly disgusting that the press gets to say whatever it wants to – you know, what the rest of us call freedom of the press, as spelled out in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Q: Do you want to increase the nuclear arsenal?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, I never discussed increasing it. I want it in perfect shape. That was just fake news by NBC, which gives a lot of fake news, lately. No, I never discuss — I think somebody said I want ten times the nuclear weapons that we have right now. Right now, we have so many nuclear weapons. I want them in perfect condition, perfect shape. That’s the only thing I’ve ever discussed. General Mattis put out a statement, or is putting out a statement, saying that that was fake news — that it was just mentioned that way. And it’s, frankly, disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write. And people should look into it. No, I want to have absolutely perfectly maintained — which we are in the process of doing — nuclear force. But when they said I want ten times what we have right now, it’s totally unnecessary. Believe me. Because I know what we have right now.

Bolding mine.

Q: Mr. President, do you think there should be limits on what the press should write?

TRUMP: No, the press should speak more honestly. I mean, I’ve seen tremendously dishonest press. It’s not even a question of distortion, like the question that was just asked before about ten times the nuclear capability. I know the capability that we have, believe me, and it is awesome.

He’s bragging about knowing the secrets. “I know, believe me, because I’m that important.

It is massive. And so when they make up stories like that, that’s just made up. And the generals will tell you that. And then they have their sources that don’t exist. In my opinion, they don’t exist. They make up the sources. There are no sources. Any other question?

Yet Trump is a habitual liar, so why should we believe him here? Aaron Blake annotates the claim that Mattis put out a statement “saying that was fake news”:

Mattis’s denial isn’t as complete as Trump leads us to believe. Mattis said Trump never “called for” the nuclear arsenal increase. NBC reported that Trump “said he wanted” such an increase, but that it was never acted upon.

Quibbling, in other words.

Q: Are you on the same page on North Korea?

Meaning, as Tillerson.

TRUMP: I think I have a little bit different attitude on North Korea than other people might have.

Q: And your Secretary?

TRUMP: And I listen to everybody, but ultimately my attitude is the one that matters, isn’t it? That’s the way it works. That’s the way the system is.

There he is again, the toddler narcissist. Iym thuh bawss!

But I think I might have a somewhat different attitude and a different way than other people. I think perhaps I feel stronger and tougher on that subject than other people, but I listen to everybody.

He’s so unusual and fascinating, don’t you find?



Maybe we need to explain the whole world

Oct 11th, 2017 10:16 am | By

Ah so that’s why Tillerson said Trump is a fucking moron – it’s because he was shown a graphic of the reduction in the US nuclear arsenal and he promptly said ew that’s no good we need MOAR. I guess he’s not aware of the nuclear arms reduction treaty we have with Russia. Seems pretty basic for a president, but whatever.

President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest-ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.

Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.

“Line go up, not down. UP. BIG UP.”

According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the buildup.

Yes, I bet they were surprised.

The July 20 meeting was described as a lengthy and sometimes tense review of worldwide U.S. forces and operations. It was soon after the meeting broke up that officials who remained behind heard Tillerson say that Trump is a “moron.”

Just because he pointed at the graphic and screamed that he wanted MOAR?

The president’s comments during the Pentagon meeting in July came in response to a chart shown on the history of the U.S. and Russia’s nuclear capabilities that showed America’s stockpile at its peak in the late 1960s, the officials said. Some officials present said they did not take Trump’s desire for more nuclear weapons to be literally instructing the military to increase the actual numbers. But his comments raised questions about his familiarity with the nuclear posture and other issues, officials said.

They say, putting it as gently as possible. Trump of course is pitching a fit and threatening them on Twitter.

Any increase in America’s nuclear arsenal would not only break with decades of U.S. nuclear doctrine but also violate international disarmament treaties signed by every president since Ronald Reagan. Nonproliferation experts warned that such a move could set off a global arms race.

But, sadly for all of us, Trump is too stupid to understand that. The military people were unnerved to discover just how stupid.

Details of the July 20 meeting, which have not been previously reported, shed additional light on tensions among the commander in chief, members of his Cabinet and the uniformed leadership of the Pentagon stemming from vastly different world views, experiences and knowledge bases.

Moreover, the president’s comments reveal that Trump, who suggested before his inauguration that the U.S. “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability,” voiced that desire as commander in chief directly to the military leadership in the heart of the Pentagon this summer.

Some officials in the Pentagon meeting were rattled by the president’s desire for more nuclear weapons and his understanding of other national security issues from the Korean Peninsula to Iraq and Afghanistan, the officials said.

That meeting followed one held a day earlier in the White House Situation Room focused on Afghanistan in which the president stunned some of his national security team. At that July 19 meeting, according to senior administration officials, Trump asked military leaders to fire the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and compared their advice to that of a New York restaurant consultant whose poor judgment cost a business valuable time and money.

Two people familiar with the discussion said the Situation Room meeting, in which the president’s advisers anticipated he would sign off on a new Afghanistan strategy, was so unproductive that the advisers decided to continue the discussion at the Pentagon the next day in a smaller setting where the president could perhaps be more focused. “It wasn’t just the number of people. It was the idea of focus,” according to one person familiar with the discussion. The thinking was: “Maybe we need to slow down a little and explain the whole world” from a big-picture perspective, this person said.

Dear god. Dear sweet baby Jesus on toast. Maybe we need to slow down a little and explain the whole world to this fucking toddler who is somehow the head of state.

 



This piece of shit human has very fine taste in cinema

Oct 11th, 2017 9:38 am | By

Scalzi on Harvey Weinstein:

4. While we’re on the topic, let’s dispense of some other nonsense. Weinstein tried to imply that coming of age in the 60s and 70s meant his moral compass was pointed a few degrees off true. Well, that’s bullshit; I know lots of people who came of age in the 60s and 70s who know perfectly well sexual coercion and rape is immoral. Pretty much all of them, in fact.

Well, not quite, or yes but. There are also lots of people who came of age in the 60s and 70s (and 80s and 90s and 00s and teens) who think men are somehow entitled to access to women’s bodies and thus don’t see sexual coercion and rape as sexual coercion and rape but rather as men doing what they have to do to get the access that’s rightfully theirs.

7. Anyone who voted for an admitted sexual predator for president who is now blaming women for not knowing or not confronting Harvey Weinstein: Sit the fuck down. You don’t even have the veil of plausible deniability to cover the fact that you helped make Mr. “Grab ‘Em By the Pussy” the President of the United States. You knew and you didn’t care. To go after Clinton because she knew Weinstein after you cast your vote for Trump, well, shit. Got a Bible passage for you, son.

And, not that I’ve seen it, but in case it’s out there (and it probably is, somewhere): Anyone defending Weinstein on the basis of his ostensible politics or because of the great art he’s helped produce, you can sit the fuck down, too. The correct politics and the ability to spot good films and filmmakers isn’t a pass for being sexually coercive and a rapist. I’m happy to cede this piece of shit human has very fine taste in cinema. He’s still a piece of shit human.

8. I’m all for condemning both Trump and Weinstein, and any other man who uses his power to sexually coerce other people. Weinstein is a liberal and Trump is, well, whatever the hell he is (white supremacist authoritarian populist masquerading as a conservative), but both are men who have decided that they get to force themselves on women, and women should be happy or at least quiet about it. There’s no political angle to it; or more accurately, certain men of any political stripe seem happy to be predatory pieces of shit. Nor should there be any political separation to the solution to this problem: Kick all that shit to the curb.

Yes see that’s what I’m saying – they decided that they get to force themselves on women. That decision overrides any knowledge they may have had that sexual coercion and rape is immoral. They feel entitled, and they act on that feeling. Lots of men feel entitled to unquestioned access to women, and the culture at present does a great deal to confirm them in that feeling.

H/t Sackbut



Go back to Lake Wobegon and stay there

Oct 11th, 2017 9:07 am | By

Garrison Keillor is a jackass.

I am off lingonberries for the time being and Volvos and flat white furniture from Ikea. No meatballs, thank you. Once again the humorless Swedes have chosen a writer of migraines for the Nobel Prize in literature, an author of twilight meditations on time and memory and mortality and cold toast by loners looking at bad wallpaper. It’s not a prize for literature, it’s a prize for nihilism. The Swedes said he’s like Jane Austen combined with Kafka with some of Proust, three other writers you’d never invite to a party.

Jesus, where to begin. I guess at the end. Hello? The point of writers isn’t whether you would invite them to a party or not, it’s what they write. Especially once they’re dead. Also I damn well would invite Austen to a party if I could, although I’d rather invite her to lunch so that we could really talk.

At any rate if he really thinks those three are unbearably dreary and prone to meditations on cold toast, he vies for the philistine prize with Trump.

And that doesn’t describe Ishiguro either.

Finally – that from a boring folksy hack like Garrison fucking Keillor.

The words “Swedish” and “comedy” seldom appear in the same sentence except as a joke. All the Swedes with a sense of humor came to America and so what the Nobel judges recognize is bleak, cramped, emotionally stunted, enigmatic, pretentious. Millions of people around the world understand the concept of reading books for pleasure, but the Swedes think of it as a form of colonoscopy.

Does he think the Nobel in literature is for comedy?

Wait – does he think he should have won?

Meanwhile, it is a beautiful October day and I’m sitting in the kitchen, enjoying a hearty licorice tea and looking at my lovely wife. I don’t recall anyone doing anything like that in Mr. Ishiguro’s books.

Oh well then, there’s no more to be said. Clearly Mr Ishiguro should pull himself together and be a sound, healthy, outgoing, cheerful, married American man who writes about kitchens and looking at one’s lovely wife. Mr Ishiguro sounds like some kind of subversive – has anyone told the FBI about this? The FBI of 1954?

The man who should’ve won the prize goes by the name Philip Roth and what disqualifies him are the many rich descriptive passages revealing a love of the physical world and the elements of storytelling such as conversation, some of which is, since the speakers are American, way too funny, way too connected to the world.

I wonder how Garrison Keillor knows that’s what disqualifies him, as opposed to for instance his misogyny. For that matter I wonder how Garrison Keillor knows it’s a matter of disqualification at all, when there’s only one winner per year and there are a lot of writers of literature in the world. The fact that he thinks Philip Roth should have a Nobel doesn’t make that a fact about the world.

In their long-standing campaign against comedy, the Swedish Academy is doing almost as much damage as old man Nobel did with his hard work developing better rockets, cannon and explosives. They are leading young writers to aspire to vacuity.

Because young writers decide how to write based on planning to win the Nobel?

Please.

Garrison Keillor is a self-satisfied anti-intellectual folksy droning bore – and an asshole.



Where he was been superb

Oct 10th, 2017 4:28 pm | By

The BBC is also asking.

Question: How often does President Trump talk about IQ?

Answer: All the time.

When Mr Trump recently boasted that his IQ was higher than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s, it fit a pattern.

In 2013, he tweeted that his IQ was “much higher” than Barack Obama and George W Bush.

He has also claimed a higher IQ than comedian Jon Stewart and British star of The Apprentice, Lord Sugar.

Despite this, Mr Trump has never revealed his own IQ. So can we work it out?

Sure. We can work it out by watching him in action. We can compare him to other people in the same line of work. We can compare him to Clinton for instance, to Corker, to Warren, to Schumer. We can compare how they think on their feet, what they say in response to questions, how they behave in public situations.

We can think back to the debates. The contrast was stark, and at the root of it was comparative intelligence. He can’t talk like an intelligent person; it’s that simple.

Who were the smartest presidents?
“I don’t recall ever coming across a list of presidents and their IQs,” says Dr Barbara A Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia.

“But you can easily find a list of presidents inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in their universities.”

Founded in 1776, Phi Beta Kappa honours “the best and brightest liberal arts and sciences undergraduates from 286 top schools across the nation”.

Of the 44 presidents, 17 have been Phi Beta Kappa members. Bill Clinton, George H W Bush, and Jimmy Carter were the most recent.

Phi Beta Kappa counts? And Trump isn’t? Cool, then we know I’m smarter than Trump. Neener.

Professor Fred I Greenstein, professor of politics emeritus at Princeton University, lists six qualities that bear on presidential performance.

They are: public communication, organisational capacity, political skill, vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence.

There; that’s a much better framework to talk about it than “IQ.” Trump is abysmal on the first and last. The ones in between…I guess are debatable.

“Trump scores low on emotional intelligence, cognitive style, vision, and organisational capacity,” says Dr Perry.

“Where he was been superb, in order to win the presidency, is public communication and political skill.”

Mmmmmmmno. Political skill, ok, but public communication, no. He succeeded with that not because he’s intelligent at it but because there are so many people who like the other kind. I don’t think it can really be called intelligent public communication when he can appeal only to angry racists and fails utterly at trying to talk to the rest of the world.



One of the highest

Oct 10th, 2017 3:55 pm | By

Trump apparently thinks “IQ” is a straightforward synonym for “intelligence.” He also apparently thinks he has lots of both.

In an interview with Forbes magazine published Tuesday morning, President Trump talks about his high IQ to explain away reports that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson referred to him as a “moron” over the summer.

Said Trump: “I think it’s fake news, but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.”

That’s funny, because pretty much everyone else in the world can tell you otherwise.

This is hardly the first time that Trump has cited his reportedly sky-high IQ — and the relatively low IQs of his political rivals — to make a point or win an argument. In fact, it’s one of his favorite pieces of rhetoric. Below are 22 times he’s brandished his IQ as a political weapon.

It contradicts itself! An intelligent person wouldn’t post a tweet like that.

Also, I’ve seen few people in public life less compassionate than Donald Trump.

Ha, no, again. We don’t know it and it isn’t true. He’s thick as a plank.

Philip Bump at the Post:

Trump both puts a lot of weight on IQ tests as an objective measure of intelligence (to which scientists probably would object) and believes that few, if any, people can match his own score. Trump uses his IQ like he uses his net worth: It’s always higher than you might assume and there’s no way to ever pin it down.

To pin it down, maybe, but to draw conclusions based on what we see and hear? There’s plenty of way to do that.

Like this for instance!

Rochester, N.Y., April 2016:

“In fact, this is the second record cold spell on the whole big section of the United States. It’s not just Rochester. The whole big section. It’s like record, record cold. And I keep hearing about global warming. Now they’ll say, ‘He doesn’t understand. This is a world-wide problem.’ Oh no, I don’t understand? Let’s do IQ tests.”

“Good Morning Britain,” May 2016:

PIERS MORGAN: Sadiq Khan is the first Muslim Mayor of London. He has attacked you for being ignorant. He says that if you’re president…
TRUMP: Let’s do an IQ test.

The evidence is in.



He is taking the time to focus on his family

Oct 10th, 2017 12:39 pm | By

The Times has a new story to add more to the growing heap of Harvey Weinstein ordure.

Gwyneth Paltrow was one. Rosanna Arquette was one. Judith Godrèche, a leading French actress, has a story.

So does Angelina Jolie, who said that during the release of “Playing by Heart” in the late 1990s, he made unwanted advances on her in a hotel room, which she rejected.

“I had a bad experience with Harvey Weinstein in my youth, and as a result, chose never to work with him again and warn others when they did,” Ms. Jolie said in an email. “This behavior towards women in any field, any country is unacceptable.”

A New York Times investigation last week chronicled a hidden history of sexual harassment allegations against Mr. Weinstein and settlements he paid, often involving former employees, over three decades up to 2015. By Sunday evening, his entertainment company fired him.

On Tuesday, The New Yorker published a reportthat included multiple allegations of sexual assault, including forced oral and vaginal sex. The article also included accounts of sexual harassment going back to the 1990s, with women describing how intimidating Mr. Weinstein was.

Several days ago, additional actresses began sharing with The Times on-the-record stories of casting-couch abuses. Their accounts hint at the sweep of Mr. Weinstein’s alleged harassment, targeting women on the way to stardom, those who had barely acted and others in between.

It’s turning into a damn army.

The encounters they recalled followed a similar narrative: First, they said, Mr. Weinstein lured them to a private place to discuss films, scripts or even Oscar campaigns. Then, the women contend, he variously tried to initiate massages, touched them inappropriately, took off his clothes or offered them explicit work-for-sex deals.

In a statement on Tuesday, his spokeswoman, Sallie Hofmeister, said: “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein has further confirmed that there were never any acts of retaliation against any women for refusing his advances. He will not be available for further comments, as he is taking the time to focus on his family, on getting counseling and rebuilding his life.”

To “focus on his family”? A bit late, isn’t it? And as for rebuilding his life – fuck that. It’s not about rebuilding anything for him, it’s about the many many many women he has bullied and harmed.

His alleged behavior became something of a Hollywood open secret: When the comedian Seth MacFarlane announced Oscar nominees in 2013, he joked, “Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.” The audience laughed.

Haw haw. Grab them by the pussy. Haw haw. Locker room talk. Haw haw.

Paltrow tells us something very telling.

When Mr. Weinstein tried to massage her and invited her into the bedroom, she immediately left, she said, and remembers feeling stunned as she drove away. “I thought you were my Uncle Harvey,” she recalled thinking, explaining that she had seen him as a mentor.

After she told Mr. Pitt about the episode, he approached Mr. Weinstein at a theater premiere and told him never to touch Ms. Paltrow again. Mr. Pitt confirmed the account to The Times through a representative.

Soon after, Mr. Weinstein called Ms. Paltrow and berated her for discussing the episode, she said. (She said she also told a few friends, family members and her agent.) “He screamed at me for a long time,” she said, once again fearing she could lose the role in “Emma.” “It was brutal.” But she stood her ground, she said, and insisted that he put the relationship back on professional footing.

He berated her for discussing it – yet he’s now claiming they were all consensual. Not very credible.

Five more women tell their stories. One of them is now an academic; she researches the objectification of women. She credits Weinstein for her interest in the subject.



They had the evidence

Oct 10th, 2017 12:10 pm | By

In the New Yorker, a long piece by – of all people – Ronan Farrow on the sexual bullying of Harvey Weinstein.

This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories.

And they weren’t kidding – women who said no or complained were punished.

In the course of a ten-month investigation, I was told by thirteen women that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, allegations that corroborate and overlap with the Times’ revelations, and also include far more serious claims.

Three women—among them Argento and a former aspiring actress named Lucia Evans—told me that Weinstein raped them, allegations that include Weinstein forcibly performing or receiving oral sex and forcing vaginal sex. Four women said that they experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault. In an audio recording captured during a New York Police Department sting operation in 2015 and made public here for the first time, Weinstein admits to groping a Filipina-Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, describing it as behavior he is “used to.” Four of the women I interviewed cited encounters in which Weinstein exposed himself or masturbated in front of them.

It’s worth listening to the recording to get a fuller sense of how Weinstein bullied.

Other employees described what was, in essence, a culture of complicity at Weinstein’s places of business, with numerous people throughout the companies fully aware of his behavior but either abetting it or looking the other way. Some employees said that they were enlisted in subterfuge to make the victims feel safe. A female executive with the company described how Weinstein assistants and others served as a “honeypot”—they would initially join a meeting, but then Weinstein would dismiss them, leaving him alone with the woman.

Virtually all of the people I spoke with told me that they were frightened of retaliation. “If Harvey were to discover my identity, I’m worried that he could ruin my life,” one former employee told me. Many said that they had seen Weinstein’s associates confront and intimidate those who crossed him, and feared that they would be similarly targeted. Four actresses, including Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette, told me they suspected that, after they rejected Weinstein’s advances or complained about them to company representatives, Weinstein had them removed from projects or dissuaded people from hiring them. Multiple sources said that Weinstein frequently bragged about planting items in media outlets about those who spoke against him; these sources feared that they might be similarly targeted. Several pointed to Gutierrez’s case, in 2015: after she went to the police, negative items discussing her sexual history and impugning her credibility began rapidly appearing in New York gossip pages. (In the taped conversation with Gutierrez, Weinstein asks her to join him for “five minutes,” and warns, “Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes.”)

Weinstein’s representative has put out a statement saying it was all consensual and he was a very naughty boy but it was all consensual and he’ll get help and maybe he can come back, because it was all consensual, really it was.

While Weinstein and his representatives have said that the incidents were consensual, and were not widespread or severe, the women I spoke to tell a very different story.

And we read some of the stories.

We learn of how that recording happened.

In March, 2015, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who was once a finalist in the Miss Italy contest, met Harvey Weinstein at a reception for “New York Spring Spectacular,” a show that he was producing at Radio City Music Hall. Weinstein introduced himself to Gutierrez, who was twenty-two, remarking repeatedly that she looked like the actress Mila Kunis.

Following the event, Gutierrez’s agency e-mailed to say that Weinstein wanted to set up a business meeting as soon as possible. Gutierrez arrived at Weinstein’s office in Tribeca early the next evening with her modelling portfolio. In the office, she sat with Weinstein on a couch to review the portfolio, and he began staring at her breasts, asking if they were real. Gutierrez later told officers of the New York Police Department Special Victims Division that Weinstein then lunged at her, groping her breasts and attempting to put a hand up her skirt while she protested. He finally backed off and told her that his assistant would give her tickets to “Finding Neverland,” a Broadway musical that he was producing. He said that he would meet her at the show that evening.

Instead of going to the show that night, Gutierrez went to the nearest N.Y.P.D. precinct station and reported the assault. Weinstein telephoned her later that evening, annoyed that she had failed to appear at the show. She picked up the call while sitting with investigators from the Special Victims Division, who listened in on the call and devised a plan: Gutierrez would agree to see the show the following day and then meet with Weinstein. She would wear a wire and attempt to extract a confession or incriminating statement.

The next day, Gutierrez met Weinstein at the bar of the Tribeca Grand Hotel. A team of undercover officers helped guide her through the interaction. On the recording, which I have heard in full, Weinstein lists actresses whose careers he has helped and offers Gutierrez the services of a dialect coach. Then he presses her to join him in his hotel room while he showers. Gutierrez says no repeatedly; Weinstein persists, and after a while she accedes to his demand to go upstairs. But, standing in the hallway outside his room, she refuses to go farther. In an increasingly tense exchange, he presses her to enter. Gutierrez says, “I don’t want to,” “I want to leave,” and “I want to go downstairs.” She asks him directly why he groped her breasts the day before.

“Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in,” Weinstein says. “I’m used to that. Come on. Please.”

“You’re used to that?” Gutierrez asks, sounding incredulous.

“Yes,” Weinstein says. He later adds, “I won’t do it again.”

After almost two minutes of back-and-forth in the hallway, Weinstein finally agrees to let her leave.

But the DA – Cyrus Vance, who dropped that fraud case against Ivanka and Don 2 Trump – decided not to prosecute, to the fury of (at least) one of the cops. (Will it be an episode of Law and Order SVU, or will they be too afraid of being sued?) And Weinstein shut the victim up.

“We had the evidence,” the police source involved in the operation told me. “It’s a case that made me angrier than I thought possible, and I have been on the force a long time.”

Gutierrez, when contacted for this story, said that she was unable to discuss the incident. According to a source close to the matter, after the D.A.’s office decided not to press charges, Gutierrez, facing Weinstein’s legal team, and in return for a payment, signed a highly restrictive nondisclosure agreement with Weinstein, including an affidavit stating that the acts Weinstein admits to in the recording never happened.

Weinstein’s use of such settlements was reported by the Times and confirmed to me by numerous sources. A former employee with firsthand knowledge of two settlement negotiations that took place in London in the nineteen-nineties recalled, “It felt like David versus Goliath . . . the guy with all the money and the power flexing his muscle and quashing the allegations and getting rid of them.”

Fantasy Island: Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump castaway on a tiny hot ugly island with enough supplies to survive but no luxuries.

H/t Screechy Monkey



Deals that assure him a win

Oct 10th, 2017 10:58 am | By

Forbes suggests we need to get a grip and understand President Pinhead. He’s a “dealmaker”; he’s in it for maximum payoff for himself, and nothing else. At first glance that sounds to me like just Capitalism, but of course it’s not that simple.

Donald Trump didn’t get rich building businesses, despite years of brand-burnishing via The Apprentice and millions of votes from people who craved exactly that experience. Instead, his forte lies in transactions–buying and selling and cutting deals that assure him a win regardless of the outcome for others. The nuance is essential. Entrepreneurs and businesspeople create and run entities that have any number of interested parties–shareholders and customers and employees and partners and hometowns–that in theory all share in success. Under Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Apple has helped early shareholders multiply their investments nearly 400-fold, turned thousands of options-wielding employees into millionaires (swelling the local tax base), performed similar wonders for Taiwanese supplier Foxconn and made customers so deliriously happy that they wait all night to fork over hundreds of dollars for products that will be obsolete two years later.

Dealmakers rarely seek that kind of win-win-win-win-win. Whether it’s a stock trade, a swap of middle relievers or optioning a real estate parcel, a deal tends to involve just two parties and generally results in one coming out ahead of the other (so much so that a “win-win” is considered a noteworthy aberration). “Man is the most vicious of all animals,” Trump told People in 1981 (and it merited a mention the first time he appeared in Forbes , a year later). “Life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.” It’s a mentality that remains hard-wired in President Trump.

Nearly a year after the most stunning Election Day in many decades, pundits still profess to find themselves continually shocked by President Trump. They shouldn’t be: His worldview has been incredibly consistent. Rather than as an opportunity to turn ideology into policy, he views governing the way he does business–as an endless string of deals, to be won or lost, both at the negotiating table and in the court of public opinion.

And, furthermore, the win is for him, not for the country or the people or even for rich people. Just for him. Him is all he cares about.

This is why he loves numbers.

Numbers offer Trump validation. They determine the winner or loser of any deal and establish an industry hierarchy. It’s why Trump, more than any of the 1,600 or so people who’ve been on The Forbes 400, has spent more time lobbying and cajoling Forbes to get a higher valuation–and validation.

He’s similarly proud of the GDP. “So GDP last quarter was 3.1%. Most of the folks that are in your business, and elsewhere, were saying that would not be hit for a long time. You know, Obama never hit the number.”

When informed that his predecessor did, several times, Trump pivots immediately. “He never hit it on a yearly basis. Never hit it on a yearly basis. That’s eight years. I think we’ll go substantially higher than that. And I think this quarter would have been phenomenal, except for the hurricanes.”

For Trump, numbers also serve as a pliant tool. American business has fully embraced Big Data, Moneyball -style analytics and machine learning, where figures suggest the best course of action. But Trump, for decades, has boasted about how he conducts his own research–largely anecdotal–and then buys or sells based on instinct. Numbers are then used to justify his gut. He governs exactly that way, sticking with even his most illogical campaign promises–the kind other politicians walk back from once confronted with actual policy decisions, whether making Mexico pay for a border wall when illegal immigration is historically low or pulling the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, despite the fact that compliance is voluntary–citing whatever figures he can to justify his stances. When asked about Russian interference in the election, for example, he notes that he got 306 electoral votes and adds that the Democrats need “an excuse for losing an election that in theory they should have won.” For the greatest-ever American salesman (yes, including P.T. Barnum), statistics serve as marketing grist.

When at a loss, just mention a number, however irrelevant.

In any situation, Trump must be the alpha dog. Delegation isn’t his strong suit. Witness what happened when Tillerson apparently reopened a dialogue with the North Koreans. “He was wasting his time,” Trump now says. But doesn’t publicly upbraiding his top diplomat effectively neuter him? “I’m not undermining,” Trump says. “I think I’m actually strengthening authority.” It’s hard to see whose authority he’s strengthening, other than his own.

In Donald Trump’s orbit, clearly, no one is off-limits. A decade ago, Donald Trump Jr. told Forbes this story about his now-presidential father. “I’d be going to work with my dad when I was 5 or 6 years old… .

“Besides telling me again and again not to drink, not to smoke and not to chase women, he always told me: ‘Never trust anybody.’ Then he’d ask me if I trusted anybody. I’d say, ‘No.’ ‘Do you trust me?’ he’d ask. I’d say, ‘Yes.’ “

“And he’d say: ‘No! Don’t even trust me!’ “

What a hideous little story. (Notice he heeded the advice about trust but not about not chasing women.) What a loathsome cold affection-killing story.

All self, all numbers, no trust. Sums him up.



Temperamentally unable to exercise anything like mature judgment

Oct 9th, 2017 5:47 pm | By

Corker spelled out that nearly all the Republicans in Congress know Trump is unfit. James Fallows says ok so what are they going to do about it?

Senator Bob Corker, a Republican of Tennessee, deserves credit for saying in public this evening to The New York Times what most prominent Republicans have known and many have said (in careful privacy) over the past two years.

Namely: that Donald Trump is irrational, ill-informed, impulsive, unfit for command, and increasingly a danger to the country and the world. The man who has ultimate authority over the world’s most powerful military, including its nuclear weaponry, is recklessly issuing threats to North Korea and others that set the nation “on the path to World War III,” according to Corker—who, for the record, is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” he told Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler of the Times.

This situation is not normal. It is not safe. And the group which for now has a monopoly on legislative and investigative power in Washington, Corker’s own Republican Party, has an obligation to the country’s past and its future to do something about it.

It’s had that obligation all along, it had it during the campaign and after the election and after the inauguration, but it has it all the more with every hour of this maniac armed with nuclear weapons.

I have heard, first-hand, from Republican senators, representatives, and other dignitaries that they view Donald Trump as a menace in his current role. It’s not (just) that they disagree with some of what he does. It’s that they consider him intellectually unaware of the cliffs toward which he is steering the country, and temperamentally unable to exercise anything like mature judgment. In these and other ways, including his personal and financial ethics, they know that he is outside the range of suitability to hold this job.

Then they should remove him, without delay. I’m tired of seeing “But they never will, because their jobs.” The mismatch is grotesque. On the one hand a hopeless rage-prone lunatic in a position to destroy everything, on the other hand Their Careers. Come on now. Yes I know self-interest is a powerful drug, but come on now.

For congressional Republicans, this is your moment in history’s eye. One of your colleagues, who has chosen not to run for office again, and who also was the object of one of Trump’s intemperate attacks this morning, has decided that he might as well tell the truth. It turns out that this is often the right way to go! As the (slightly altered) line from Mark Twain put it, by telling the truth you will gratify some people and astonish the rest. Perhaps Corker’s motivations are not the purest or most glorious. He was nice to Trump last year, when Corker was in the mentioning-cloud as a possible secretary of state, and he was part of the “respectable” Republicans who disastrous enabled Trump. Corker’s retorts todayfollowed personal attacks from Trump. Still, he’s doing more than his colleagues have.  And Corker has moved toward a better place for himself in the annals of Senate history than he would have had only 24 hours ago.

This most definitely should not be the last step for Corker. If he believes what he says, then as the chairman of the relevant committee in the Senate he has important tools to use. He can issue subpoenas and summon executive branch witnesses as soon as he can get his colleagues back in town. He can draft legislation about the procedure, the grounds, and the justifications before the U.S. commits troops to war. He could urge his colleagues toward the next step through their stages-of-tragedy relationship with Trump. Stage one was carping and dismissal during the first half of 2016, when he was an entertaining long-shot. Stage two was Vichy-regime acquiescence to him during the campaign. Stage three was “support” early this year, toward the goal of the Gorsuch confirmation and the hope of a tax-cut bill. Now we see the inklings of stage four, with the dawning awareness of what Corker spelled out: that they have empowered something genuinely dangerous. It’s time for Corker to act on that knowledge, and his colleagues too.

Do it. This is not a joke, and it’s not a drill.



Choices

Oct 9th, 2017 5:13 pm | By

Saturday the white supremacists came back to Charlottesville.

The prominent white supremacist Richard B. Spencer was a featured speaker at a rally on Saturday in Charlottesville, Va., where demonstrators reprised their chant of “You will not replace us!” and asserted that the South would “rise again.”

The gathering, which occurred eight weeks after a “Unite the Right” rally resulted in the death of a 32-year-old woman, was considerably smaller than the one in August, instead resembling a group of protesters who descended on the park in May.

The Charlottesville Police Department said in a statement that Saturday’s rally began around 7:40 p.m., included 40 to 50 people and lasted no more than 10 minutes.

Good that it was small, but not good that Spencer and his friends feel entitled to keep throwing pro-racism demonstrations.

On Twitter, Mayor Mike Signer of Charlottesville urged the demonstrators to “Go home!”

Rallies for Racism aren’t really something the world needs.

So what were the president and vice-president doing yesterday? Making statements against racism? Oh hell no – they were making a huge fuss about black athletes protesting racist violence.

So that’s where we are.

H/t Eiynah



Emma called Harvey out

Oct 9th, 2017 4:09 pm | By

Harvey Weinstein didn’t just sexually harass women, he also [cough ALLEGEDLY cough] called them fat pigs. Emma Thompson tore a strip off him.

One film industry source told The New York Post that Weistein called then 24-year-old British-American actress Hayley Atwell she was a “fat pig on screen” while cast and crew were taking a break from filming Brideshead Revisited. The Hollywood veteran then allegedly told Atwell she should watch what she ate.

The unnamed source then went on to reveal that Atwell’s co-star Emma Thompson was furious with what happened.

“Emma called Harvey out for being a misogynist and a bully and really gave him a hard time,” the source said.

Hayley Atwell in Brideshead Revisited.

Hayley Atwell with (from left) Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw in the 2008 film Brideshead Revisited.

Harvey Weinstein.

Harvey Weinstein is taking a leave of absence from his own company after The New York Times released a report alleging ...

I don’t call people fat pigs, because it’s disgusting, but if somebody threatened to pull my arms off if I didn’t agree that one of those people is a fat pig, I wouldn’t select the woman in the green frock.

Thompson has previously revealed she threatened to quit Brideshead Revisited because a co-star was told to lose weight. However, it was not known who allegedly made the insulting remarks until now.

Earlier this year, the Love Actually star told Swedish chat show Skavlan she was furious because her co-star already looked “exquisite” and there are too many people struggling with eating disorders.

“I said to them, ‘If you speak to her about this again, on any level, I will leave this picture. You are never to do that’,” she said. “It’s evil, what’s happening, what’s going on out there, and it’s getting worse.

Well done Emma. Live long and prosper.



He was a rock star

Oct 9th, 2017 12:59 pm | By

Trump told us over the weekend what fun he had in Puerto Rico. That’s nice. It’s always good to see the misery of millions provide a little entertainment for a head of state.

Over the weekend, President Donald J. Trump praised his response to the devastation caused to the island of Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria, which left dozens dead and thousands without power or potable water.

“I was having fun,” Trump said of his four-hour visit to San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital, last Tuesday. That visit, most memorably, had him throwing paper towels to an audience gathered to see him inside a church. “They had these beautiful, soft towels. Very good towels,” Trump said. He claimed that the people of Puerto Rico also had “fun” during his visit. As he usually does, Trump dismissed critics while offering himself exceedingly high marks.

“And I came in and there was a crowd of a lot of people. And they were screaming and they were loving everything,” Trump said of his visit to the Calvary Chapel, where the now-famous tossing of the paper towels took place.

The comments came in a Saturday interview with Mike Huckabee on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which offers Christian-themed broadcasting.

Like for instance Donald “you can grab them by the pussy” Trump. Ok.

In Saturday’s interview, Huckabee said that everyone but presumably liberal media outlets had described Trump’s response to the hurricane as “pitch perfect.” Trump agreed with this assessment. He dismissed all criticism as “fake news” while detailing the high praise he’d received.

“We did a great job,” Trump said.

“You were a rock star,” Huckabee agreed.

Trump tweeted confirmation of these excellent reviews.

 



Pence’s pricey junket

Oct 9th, 2017 12:33 pm | By

How much did Pence’s flight from Las Vegas to Indianapolis in order to walk out of a football game cost us? CNN does the adding up.

Here is an estimate of just the air costs (which does not include costs of advance personnel, Secret Service or support on the ground):

According to the Air Force, flying a C-32, the model of plane used for Air Force 2, for one hour costs about $30,000. Pence’s flight from Las Vegas to Indianapolis Saturday took about three hours and 20 minutes, so it cost about $100,000
Pence then flew from Indianapolis to Los Angeles on Sunday, which took about four hours and 45 minutes, costing about $142,500.

The grand total: about $242,500.

A quarter of a million before you take the other expenses into account. All that just to march into a football stadium, wait a few minutes, and then march out again.

And what was the purpose of your journey? To whip up more hatred of black people.



Mr Nomanners

Oct 9th, 2017 12:03 pm | By

The Times has a Republican’s Guide to Presidential Etiquette that it has updated to take in recent incidents in correct behavior.

Republicans used to care a whole lot about how a president comported himself, and whether he acted at all times with the dignity his station demands.

“Is President Obama Disrespecting the Oval Office?” Fox News asked in 2010, with a link to images of Mr. Obama and his aides tossing a football, or eating apples just inches from the Resolute desk.

“Wear a suit coat and tie,” said Andrew Card Jr., President George W. Bush’s former chief of staff, in reaction to pictures of Mr. Obama in shirtsleeves in 2009.

I remember that shirtsleeves nonsense. I don’t think I knew there were complaints about eating apples. I have a feeling I blogged something about substance versus appearance, and the fact that wearing a tie at all times did nothing to disguise Bush’s lack of qualification for the job.

“I do expect him to send the message that people who are going to be in the Oval Office should treat the office with the respect that it has earned over history,” Mr. Card said.

But hey, that was then! In 2017, there’s a whole new bar for tolerable conduct by the commander in chief. Our original guide cataloged several dozen examples. Almost five months later, it’s clear that an update is necessary. This expanded list is meant to ensure that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and other congressional Republicans never forget what they now condone in a president.

So, if you are the president, you may:

  • Call for the firing of “son of a bitch” athletes who choose to exercise their right to free speech

  • Deliver a speech to the Boy Scouts of America that includes mockery of a former president and winking references to sexual orgies, and then lie by claiming that the head of that organization called and told you it was the best speech ever delivered in Boy Scout history

And tweet tweet tweet, and lie lie lie. It’s a useful list.



La guerre est finie

Oct 9th, 2017 11:14 am | By

The war on coal is over; the war on the environment has intensified.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told coal miners in Kentucky on Monday that he will move to repeal a rule limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, assuring them, “The war against coal is over.”

Awesome. Let’s have more and more and MORE greenhouse-gas emissions so that the environment can crash even faster and more destructively than it already is. Those fires racing through Sonoma and Napa counties in California right now? There will be more of those! Yay! And as for the hurricanes – they’ll be like this year only more so. Fun!

“Tomorrow, in Washington D.C., I’ll be a signing a proposed rule to withdraw the so-called Clean Power Plan of the past administration, and thus begin the effort to withdraw that rule,” Pruitt said.

The 43-page proposal, which was obtained by The Washington Post and other news outlets last week, argues that the agency overstepped its legal authority in seeking to force utilities to reduce carbon emissions outside their actual facilities to meet federal emissions targets. It does not offer a replacement plan for regulating emissions of carbon dioxide, which the Supreme Court has ruled that the EPA is obligated to do. Rather, the agency said it plans to seek public input on how best to cut emissions from natural-gas and coal-fired power plants.

And to the surprise of everyone the public input will universally urge voluntary personal dedication to turning the thermostat down a degree.



Il ne regrette rien

Oct 9th, 2017 10:49 am | By

Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator who’s been brawling with Trump lately, chatted with the Times yesterday. He apparently gets what a disaster Trump is yet he thinks it will all be ok somehow.

Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”

“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.”

So then it’s a pity that Corker endorsed Trump during the election, isn’t it. It’s not as if Trump seemed ok until after the inauguration – he never seemed ok.

Trump was of course lying when he tweeted that Corker had begged for his support.

Mr. Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to run again, and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid bare a deeper rift: The senator views Mr. Trump as given to irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who has failed to make the transition from show business.

Mr. Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of senior administration officials must protect him from his own instincts. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker said in a telephone interview.

Yes, but again, none of this is surprising. It was always clear what Trump is.

The deeply personal back-and-forth will almost certainly rupture what had been a friendship with a fellow real estate developer turned elected official, one of the few genuine relationships Mr. Trump had developed on Capitol Hill. Still, even as he leveled his stinging accusations, Mr. Corker repeatedly said on Sunday that he liked Mr. Trump, until now an occasional golf partner, and wished him “no harm.”

How can a reasonable person (and Corker seems reasonable) possibly like him? If you have a friend or acquaintance who has been friendly and charming to you but is also a noisy emphatic misogynist and racist and xenophobe and bully…doesn’t that curdle the liking? That’s not some wild hypothetical, I’m sure we’ve all had that experience in miniature and felt the tension. Trump makes it easy by skipping over any tension and just making it impossible to “like” him.

In a 25-minute conversation, Mr. Corker, speaking carefully and purposefully, seemed to almost find cathartic satisfaction by portraying Mr. Trump in terms that most senior Republicans use only in private.

The senator, who is close to Mr. Tillerson, invoked comments that the president made on Twitter last weekend in which he appeared to undercut Mr. Tillerson’s negotiations with North Korea.

“A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but that’s just not true,” Mr. Corker said.

Without offering specifics, he said Mr. Trump had repeatedly undermined diplomacy with his Twitter fingers. “I know he has hurt, in several instances, he’s hurt us as it relates to negotiations that were underway by tweeting things out,” Mr. Corker said.

Make America Great Again, yeah?

All but inviting his colleagues to join him in speaking out about the president, Mr. Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.

“Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they understand the volatility that we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around him to keep him in the middle of the road.”

Then they should invoke Article 25 without delay. The man is wholly unfit, he’s deranged, he’s reckless – why are they not removing him from office?

One of the most prominent establishment-aligned Republicans to develop a relationship with Mr. Trump, the senator said he did not regret standing with him during the campaign last year.

“I would compliment him on things that he did well, and I’d criticize things that were inappropriate,” he said. “So it’s been really the same all the way through.”

Well he should regret it. The Trump of now is the Trump of then. He should regret it.

In August, after Mr. Trump’s equivocal response to the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Corker told reporters that the president “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”

He said on Sunday that he had made all those comments deliberately, aiming them at “an audience of one, plus those people who are closely working around with him, what I would call the good guys.” He was referring to Mr. Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly.

“As long as there are people like that around him who are able to talk him down when he gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work with him before a decision gets made, I think we’ll be fine,” he said.

That’s just incomprehensible to me.



Virtue signaling

Oct 8th, 2017 3:42 pm | By

And in between threatening new wars and teasing us with military surprises and attacking senators on Twitter, Trump and his people manage to find time to continue their ridiculous fight with football players who have the temerity to protest racism.

Vice President Mike Pence left a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday after some players knelt during the National Anthem, saying he did not want to “dignify” the event.

“I left today’s Colts game because @POTUS and I will not dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National Anthem,” Pence wrote on Twitter.

Except that it doesn’t “disrespect our soldiers”; that’s why they kneel instead of sitting: it’s specifically to combine respect for our soldiers (many of whom, I might add, are black) with protesting police violence against black people. An administration with any decency and with any sense of duty to all the people would take that on board instead of constantly picking fights over it. Football players really are not doing anything wrong by refusing to follow a particular custom. It’s not as if they’re shitting in church. It’s just football. It’s just a song. Singing a patriotic song before a football game is not some kind of legal obligation. It’s not even a very old custom. It’s just some thing that somebody decided to do not that long ago; it’s not at all clear why players shouldn’t be free to reject or adapt the custom. People in other countries think we’re deeply weird for putting on a dumb patriotic display before getting down to smashing heads together. Presidents and their colleagues should have more important things to do than to make a fuss about it.

Donald Trump Jr., the President’s eldest son, tweeted his support for Pence’s decision.

Ahhhhhh that’s such a disgusting – and racist – thing to say. “Pride in our country” forsooth – that from the family that has been selling the country to Putin for years. God they are scum.

Bill Kristol is not impressed either. Yet again, weird to be in agreement with Bill Kristol.



The de facto chief cartoonist for alt-Twitter

Oct 8th, 2017 3:12 pm | By

I hadn’t heard of the cartoonist Ben Garrison until I was looking for something else a couple of hours ago and saw this masterpiece:

ThinkProgress wrote about him last month:

Spend any time on some of the internet’s more devoted pro-Trump sites and you’ll likely come across one of Ben Garrison’s cartoons. Instead of using his artwork to mock the president, he frequently depicts Trump as a young, muscular, all-American hero, standing up to the Deep State swamp monster or slaying the dragon of Political Correctness

Since 2015, Garrison has been the de facto chief cartoonist for right-wing communities online. His work regularly features at the top of the popular sub-reddit, r/The_Donald, and has been shared by Mike Cernovich and Julian Assange. Garrison now has nearly 100,000 followers on Twitter. He is also no stranger to controversy.  In 2016 he was accused of racism for drawing a cartoon that featured a pageant-ready Melania Trump next to a butch, unhappy-looking Michelle Obama.

Well accusing him of racism is just political correctness run mad, mk?

There’s more of his work on his Facebook wall:

Image may contain: 4 people, text

When did Trump ever observe a moment of silence? When did he ever look like that? But more to the point, which is more useful, a moment of silence, or trying to prevent mass shootings? Why are we supposed to think an empty pious gesture is a sacred good thing while actually trying to do something about the killings is rude and noisy and something only a horrible old witch would do?

No automatic alt text available.

That’s not the Carmen Yulin Cruz we all saw last week.

On the other hand, the guy also posts nice photos of Montana landscapes on his wall.