Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on There might be some coal under there.

For everyone out there who doesn’t understand the problem, I have a message for you: The economy is man-made. The environment is not. Which one do you think we could manage to remake if they conflict? And which one can we absolutely not live without?

Exactly. Beautifully formulated. Or to paraphrase Bill McKibben, as difficult as it may be to change the economic system, it’s almost certainly going to be easier than persuading the laws of physics to change their minds. My first question to anyone who argues that protecting the environment is going to harm the economy is “Compared to what?” After all, there can be no prospering economy on an uninhabitable planet. If doing whatever it takes to keep the planet habitable means the economy is screwed, then it’s screwed either way, and all the covfefe in the world is never going to save it.

I’ve been reading up on things like degrowth and steady state economic models lately, and, historically speaking, the all-destroying perpetual growth model has only been with us for the blink of an eye. If people could live without it in the past they can live without it today. Of course modern technologies and standards of living haven’t been with us for very long either, but there is no law of nature that says technology can only be used to keep the economy growing for ever. Imagine if increased efficiency meant we got to work less rather than produce more. Sounds great to me. And to those who argue that perpetual growth is necessary to lift people out of poverty, I can’t resist sharing the following quote from the book Enough Is Enough by Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill:

Economic growth has been cited by the World Bank as the “essential ingredient for sustained poverty reduction.” But for every $100 of global economic growth that occurred between 1990 and 2001, only 60 cents went to people below the $1-per-day line. In other words, to get the poorest people of the world an extra $1 required a $166 increase in global production and consumption. Someone is profiting from economic growth, but it’s not the world’s poor.

John McWhorter at the Aspen Ideas Festival last June, answering questions about students and free speech.

The whole white privilege paradigm is very interesting because I think it should be part of an education for students to learn that there is something, and I’ll title it white privilege, that’s fine. These are things that must be considered, such that a student wouldn’t look at a disadvantaged part of the city and just say, “Well what’s wrong with them?” The idea is to understand that a lot of what the person sees is that people start out at different places––and that whiteness is a privilege. However, our problem once again these days is that it is being taken in a direction that is less constructive. The idea is not people can learn that there is white privilege and be considered to have learned it, and learn some other things.

The idea is you are to learn that you’re a privileged white person; you are to learn it over and over; really what you’re supposed to learn is to feel guilty about it; and to express that on a regular basis, understanding that at no point in your lifetime will you ever be a morally legitimate person, because you have this privilege. It becomes a kind of Christian teaching, and it seems to serve a certain purpose––I have to say this, I hope it doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings. For white people, it is a great way to show that you understand racism is real. For black people and Latino people, it is a great way to assuage how bad a self-image a race can have after hundreds of years of torture. I can’t speak for Latinos there, but certainly for black Americans. It ends up being a kind of a security blanket.

I don’t think that either one of those things takes students anywhere. To be a black student who learns that their purpose, that something special about them, is that they can make a loud noise and make white people guilty, I don’t think that’s an education.

In other words it’s a dead end. It’s necessary at times but it’s far from sufficient.

It’s certainly true that if you’re born white you have a greater chance at success than if you are born black. It doesn’t mean that being born black is a sentence to poverty and despair. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t a great many white people who are suffering. But the whole white privilege idea, it used to be called societal racism or institutional racism. The term started to weaken so we now say white privilege because it grabs people more by the collar.

So I’ll use it. White privilege is real.

The issue is that it shouldn’t be used as something to shut down conversation, to inculcate unreligious people with a new sense of original sin.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

Ugly.

On Thursday’s edition of Hannity, former White House deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka suggested that Hillary Clinton deserves to be tried for treason and executed.

“If this had happened in the 1950s, there would be people up on treason charges right now,” Gorka said. “The Rosenbergs, okay, this is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did, and those people got the chair. Think about it — giving away nuclear capability to our enemies, that’s what we’re talking about.”

But it wasn’t hers to “give away.”

As secretary of state, Clinton was one of nine cabinet members sitting on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is tasked with reviewing deals like Uranium One. Clinton’s position on that committee and the donations to her foundation — in combination with the recent reporting from The Hill — has led Trump supporters to allege that she might have been engaged in corrupt dealings. On Tuesday, House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) announced that his committee is launching a new investigation into the matter.

But there’s no evidence that Clinton was up to anything corrupt. As the Washington Post detailed on October 24, it doesn’t appear Clinton and other officials on CFIUS were looped in about the FBI’s investigation, which was ongoing when CFIUS was reviewing Uranium One. What’s more, after Trump made Uranium One an issue on the campaign trail last year, Snopes detailed how the Uranium One deal wasn’t actually Clinton’s to veto or approve, and how the timing of the overwhelming majority of the aforementioned donations to her foundation didn’t match the timeline of the uranium deal being approved.

Picky picky picky. Just give her the chair, and sort out the details later.

The difficulties of writing dialogue for characters who share an idiom foreign to the writer – specifically, UKnians writing Yank and Yanks writing UKnian.

[I]t’s fairly common for British writers to create ostensibly American characters who give themselves away in dialogue. The writer need not even be British, necessarily: Lionel Shriver is an American writer who has lived in the U.K. for many years. Her most recent novel, “The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,” imagines a financial apocalypse set entirely in the United States, albeit in the future. All of the major characters are American. And yet a father assures his son that a set of silverware “could come in useful.” A woman signs off a telephone conversation with her sister by deploying a British term of endearment: “Bye, puppet.”

Wot? The British term of endearment is “poppet,” not “puppet.” Puppet is just weird. Maybe Shriver’s character was accusing her sister of being a mindless automaton.

A woman tells a child, “You’re a bit young to send into the fields. I could be done for violating child labor laws.” (The lingering Britishisms are especially curious because other aspects of the text and dialogue are Americanized—even the novel’s British edition uses “z” rather than “s” in words like “apologize” and “publicized.”)

“My publishers think I have become some kind of linguistic moron,” Shriver told me. “In truth, I am one of the better sources for what is and is not British or American usage.”

And modest, too.

(It’s odd to be uncertain about that phrase – it’s really not American usage. It’s not ambiguous.)

The inverse situation—American-created British characters with off-sounding diction—appears to be less prevalent, everyone agreed, perhaps because many American writers are too unfamiliar with, or intimidated by, British usage and slang to even try. (They may also have less occasion to do so.) Shriver, in any case, has been criticized from this direction as well: some British reviewers of her novel “The Post-Birthday World,” from 2007, attacked the Cockney slang of one of its characters—a charge Shriver labels “ludicrous.”

There’s that modesty again. Wouldn’t they be more likely to know than she is?

Viner happens to be married to an American professor of linguistics, Lynne Murphy, who teaches at the University of Sussex and writes a blog called Separated by a Common Language. Next year, she will publish a book, “The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English.” Novelists, Murphy told me, tend to put their energy into crafting things that a character would say—it’s a less intuitive exercise to try and weed out what a character wouldn’t say. “It’s like trying to prove a negative,” she said.

MyaR (who comments here and is a linguist) tells me Murphy’s blog is excellent.

What’s more, making an extra effort to perfect American dialogue may have risks, Hornby suggested. “Paying American characters special attention can backfire—you spend too much time shoehorning words like ‘sidewalk’ and ‘diaper’ into places where they don’t properly belong, just to show you’re thinking about it,” he explained.

Baby carriage. Dish soap. Trunk. Faucet.

Let’s have a feel-good story, because why not.

Two women with their two dogs were lost in the Pacific in a small sailboat for five months, and then the Navy found them and rescued them.

The moment the two women and their dogs were finally rescued is captured on video, taken from the deck of a Navy boat.

The camera wobbles as the motorboat cuts across the ocean, some 900 miles southeast of Japan, toward the lone sailboat that had been sending distress signals for months after its engine died.

One of the women is on the deck, her arms outstretched.

She feverishly blows kisses toward the rescue boat. This is the reaction of someone who had been lost at sea for months.

Also the dogs are barking.

The Navy’s press release tells the story:

PACIFIC OCEAN (NNS) — The Sasebo-based amphibious dock landing ship USS Ashland (LSD 48) rendered assistance to two distressed mariners, Oct. 25, whose sailboat had strayed well off its original course.

The mariners, Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiaba, both from Honolulu, and their two dogs had set sail from Hawaii to Tahiti this spring. They had an engine casualty May 30 during bad weather but continued on, believing they could make it to land by sail.

Two months into their journey and long past when they originally estimated they would reach Tahiti, they began to issue distress calls. The two continued the calls daily, but they were not close enough to other vessels or shore stations to receive them.

On Oct. 24, they were discovered 900 miles southeast of Japan by a Taiwanese fishing vessel. The fishing vessel contacted Coast Guard Sector Guam who then coordinated with Taipei Rescue Coordination Center, the Japan Coordination Center, and the Joint Coordination Center in Honolulu to render assistance.

Operating near the area on a routine deployment, Ashland made best speed to the location of the vessel in the early morning on Oct. 25 and arrived on scene at 10:30 a.m that morning.

(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jonathan Clay/Released)

After assessing the sailboat unseaworthy, Ashland crew members brought the distressed mariners and their two dogs aboard the ship at 1:18 p.m.

“And Toto too?” “Toto too.”

(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Jonathan Clay/Released)

“I’m grateful for their service to our country. They saved our lives. The pride and smiles we had when we saw [U.S. Navy] on the horizon was pure relief,” said Appel.

Appel said they survived the situation by bringing water purifiers and over a year’s worth of food on board, primarily in the form of dry goods such as oatmeal, pasta and rice.

Once on Ashland, the mariners were provided with medical assessments, food and berthing arrangements. The mariners will remain on board until Ashland’s next port of call.

“The U.S. Navy is postured to assist any distressed mariner of any nationality during any type of situation,” said Cmdr. Steven Wasson, Ashland commanding officer.

Well done Navy.

From the ACLU:

For almost a year, Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, has struggled to hide the truth about his efforts to lobby the Trump administration to make it much harder for Americans to vote. Part of that struggle ended today when a federal court ordered excerpts of Kris Kobach’s testimony disclosed along with other documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in our challenge to his restrictive voter registration regime.

The unsealed materials confirm what many have suspected: Kobach has a ready-made plan to gut core voting rights protections enshrined in federal law. And he has been covertly lobbying Trump’s team and other officials from day one to sell them the falsehood that noncitizens are swinging elections.

As the de facto head of President Trump’s election commission, Kobach has positioned himself to lead an all-out assault on the right to vote.

Here are three big plays from Kobach’s voter suppression playbook.

Play 1: Disenfranchise new voters with severe registration restrictions

Before Kris Kobach took office as secretary of state, Kansans could register to vote the same way that people do in virtually every other state in the country: by submitting a sworn oath of citizenship under penalty of perjury. In 2013, Kobach implemented a law he had pushed through the Kansas Legislature two years earlier, requiring people to track down a citizenship document — such as a passport or birth certificate — or be barred from the ballot box. The new system proved disastrous for ordinary voters.

Large numbers of citizens — disproportionately minorities — don’t have a passport or birth certificate on hand and don’t have the money to obtain replacement documents. By December 2015, more than 35,000 Kansans had been disenfranchised — approximately 14 percent of all registration applications since the requirement went into effect. The National Voter Registration Act — popularly known as the Motor-Voter law — prohibits unduly harsh registration rules and requires that states make voter registration easy and straightforward.

Kobach’s severe documentation requirements violated the NVRA so we sued. In October 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10^th Circuit blocked the requirement for people registering at DMVs. The opinion by a George W. Bush-appointed judge found that Kobach’s law had caused a “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.” The court noted that before a state could impose such sweeping restrictions, there would need to be proof that significant numbers of noncitizens were actually registering to vote. But Kobach had no evidence of any real problem. He could only offer “pure speculation” that hordes of invisible immigrants were hiding out in voting booths.

So what did Kobach do? He tried to re-write the law. He told Trump about his cunning plan to amend the law. Trump promptly tweeted about millions of illegal voters. Kellyanne Conway said Kobach was the source of Trump’s tweeted lie.

Kobach has been trying hard to keep all this secret. He even lied about it in court.

After Kobach was ordered to produce his papers for review, the magistrate fined him for making “patently misleading representations to the court about the documents.” When Kobach appealed that decision, the presiding judge agreed that Kobach should be sanctioned because of a “pattern” of misrepresentation “that call[s] his credibility into question.”

Kobach’s lobbying to gut the NVRA was always meant to occur behind closed doors. So he has been struggling for months to keep these documents out of public view, while secretly asking his ally, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), to introduce his proposed NVRA amendment to Congress in the future.

Why is Kobach trying so hard to hide what he’s been up to? Because the unsealed documents reveal that his true aim and that of the election commission is suppressing the right to vote.
When the 10th Circuit blocked Kobach’s law a year ago, the court found that a state has to prove that noncitizen registration fraud is actually a significant problem before it can demand a passport or birth certificate from voters. Since then, Kobach has been maneuvering behind the scenes to make sure he can impose whatever restrictions he wants without any proof. Why? Because he knows his claims about noncitizens voting are a scam.

Kobach realizes that his law has been disenfranchising tens of thousands of eligible citizens — that is the whole point. And now, he’s poised to do the same nationwide.

We’d better stop him.

To the surprise of no one, Harvey Weinstein wasn’t the only hotshot guy preying on women.

Following The New York Times and The New Yorker’s revelations about the film executive and alleged serial sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein, Lockhart Steele of Vox Media, the screenwriter James Toback, the critic Leon Wieseltier, and, on Thursday, Mark Halperin of MSNBC have found themselves outed and, in some cases, fired for alleged past behavior. Preceding Weinstein were reports about alleged harassment at Tinder and Uber, and the alleged predatory behavior of Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, and Bill Cosby, among others. Many more disclosures are likely to come, as the politics, technology, news, and entertainment industries come to terms with the pervasive problems of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in their ranks.

It’s rather sad they waited until now to come to terms with the pervasive problems of sex discrimination and sexual harassment in their ranks. It’s not as if no one knew about them.

Up to 85 percent of women say that they have been sexually harassed at work, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The problem appears to be particularly acute in service industries, in which employees rely on tips and interface frequently with customers; in low-wage industries, in which employees have little power to begin with; and in industries dominated by men, like construction.

Which leaves…um…does it leave anything?

Sexual abuse is a consistent and pervasive feature of the modern workforce, but despite how consistent and pervasive harassment is, there is scant data and public information about it. Women tend to keep the knowledge of such incidents to themselves, for one. They more often than not do not report them, due to a fear of not being believed, a sexist culture in the workplace, a belief that nothing would happen or change, and reasonable concerns about retaliation.

Yeah that pretty much covers it. People who are bullied are afraid of more and worse bullying.

Within workplaces, too, a lack of recognition of the problem is common as well—helping foster a lack of accountability and a lack of repercussions for harassers. Take the case of Wieseltier, for instance. Numerous women have said that he had touched them, propositioned them, or made inappropriate sexual comments to them while he worked at The New Republic. (Wieseltier has apologized for “offenses” that made his former colleagues “feel demeaned and disrespected,” and Emerson Collective, which owns a majority share in The Atlantic, has cancelled his forthcoming publication.) In a piece by Jason Cherkis at HuffPost, former New Republic editors described a workplace culture in which male leaders declined to act on what was happening.

Wieseltier is important and they’re not.

The flood of public revelations about bad behavior in tech, media, and politics—from Susan J. Fowler’s whistle-blowing on the workplace culture at Uber to the stories about Weinstein and others to the Cosby allegations—has shown that sunshine can sometimes act as a disinfectant. Women coming forward to share their stories begets other women coming forward to share their stories begets consequences, in some cases and in some industries at least.

Maybe, and yet…here we still are, after all this time. I’m not brimming with optimism.

It’s almost as if assault is actually a crime.

Three suspects are being sought by police after a woman was punched and kicked during a brawl between transgender activists and radical feminists.

The 60-year-old victim was punched in the face, knocked to the ground and kicked after one of the suspects tried to grab her camera as she was filming at a gender recognition talk, the Metropolitan police said.

Officers are trying to trace a man and two others, who are believed to be transgender, over the attack at around 9.30pm on Wednesday 13 September at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park.

Those three.

Harvey Weinstein’s topple has dragged Leon Wieseltier down now.

Leon Wieseltier, a prominent editor at The New Republic for three decades who was preparing to unveil a new magazine next week, apologized on Tuesday for “offenses against some of my colleagues in the past” after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances.

As those allegations came to light, Laurene Powell Jobs, a leading philanthropist whose for-profit organization, Emerson Collective, was backing Mr. Wieseltier’s endeavor, decided to pull the plug on it.

Bad luck for him that his backer is a woman, I guess.

A spokesman said Emerson Collective would not elaborate further on the nature or source of the information it had received. But stories about Mr. Wieseltier’s behavior are now surfacing in the aftermath of revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual assaults and harassment of women.

Over the past week, a group of women who once worked at The New Republic had been exchanging emails about their own accounts of Mr. Wieseltier’s behavior in and out of the magazine’s office in Washington, according to one person who has seen the confidential chain and was granted anonymity to describe its contents.

Several women on the chain said they were humiliated when Mr. Wieseltier sloppily kissed them on the mouth, sometimes in front of other staff members. Others said he discussed his sex life, once describing the breasts of a former girlfriend in detail. Mr. Wieseltier made passes at female staffers, they said, and pressed them for details about their own sexual encounters.

One woman recounted that while she was attempting to fact-check a column Mr. Wieseltier wrote, he forced her to look at a photograph of a nude sculpture in an art book, asking her if she had ever seen a more erotic picture. She wrote that she was shaken and afraid during the incident.

Mr. Wieseltier often commented on what women wore to the office, the former staff members said, telling them that their dresses were not tight enough. One woman said he left a note on her desk thanking her for the miniskirt she wore to the office that day. She said she never wore a skirt to the office again.

And then there’s a shocker.

According to the women, male staff members routinely witnessed Mr. Wieseltier’s behavior and did nothing.

Nice.

He quit the New Republic after the takeover.

After Mr. Wieseltier’s departure from The New Republic, he landed on his feet, becoming the Isaiah Berlin senior fellow in culture and policy at the Brookings Institution as well as a contributing writer and critic at The Atlantic magazine.

Ah, well, I just saw a tweet saying Brookings has dropped him – that’s what alerted me to the story. Will the Atlantic follow suit? Probably.

I always found Wieseltier annoying as a critic. My surprise to find he’s also annoying as a human is not vast.

Two more people in Puerto Rico have died of leptospirosis.

Puerto Rico has announced at least 76 cases of suspected and confirmed leptospirosis, including several deaths, in the month after Hurricane Maria, according to Dr. Carmen Deseda, the state epidemiologist for Puerto Rico.

The spiral-shaped Leptospira bacteria, which are found in the urine of rodents and other animals, can spread after floods through drinking water or infection of open wounds, according to the World Health Organization.

…

Since the hurricane hit in September, many in Puerto Rico have not had access to clean drinking water or electricity. As of Wednesday, a quarter of households did not have access to clean drinking water, according to data from Puerto Rico’s Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados (AAA).

But Trump went there and threw rolls of paper towels at them, so nothing further can be done.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has attempted to cover that shortage with bottled water deliveries, but some desperate residents have been drinking from whatever water sources they can find, such as rivers or creeks. Doctors and public health experts are worried that that the water crisis would lead to further health problems.

“There is a public health crisis here,” Catherine Kennedy, a vice president at National Nurses United, told CNN from Puerto Rico. “They need water. And we haven’t seen much of FEMA.”

FEMA is for people who speak English, sorry.

That vote against a new consumer protection:

Senate Republicans voted on Tuesday to strike down a sweeping new rule that would have allowed millions of Americans to band together in class-action lawsuits against financial institutions.

The overturning of the rule, with Vice President Mike Pence breaking a 50-to-50 tie, will further loosen regulation of Wall Street as the Trump administration and Republicans move to roll back Obama-era policies enacted in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. By defeating the rule, Republicans are dismantling a major effort of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog created by Congress in the aftermath of the mortgage mess.

The rule, five years in the making, would have dealt a serious blow to financial firms, potentially exposing them to a flood of costly lawsuits over questionable business practices.

And we can’t have that, so the banker class moves to protect the banker class.

For decades, credit card companies and banks have inserted arbitration clauses into the fine print of financial contracts to circumvent the courts and bar people from pooling their resources in class-action lawsuits. By forcing people into private arbitration, the clauses effectively take away one of the few tools that individuals have to fight predatory and deceptive business practices. Arbitration clauses have derailed claims of financial gouging, discrimination in car sales and unfair fees.

The new rule written by the consumer bureau, which was set to take effect in 2019, would have restored the right of individuals to sue in court. It was part of a spate of actions by the bureau, which has cracked down on debt collectors, the student loan industry and payday lenders.

But now the Republicans have put a stop to it, so debt collectors, the student loan industry and payday lenders can go right on ripping people off! Is this a great country or what.

Looking to head off a repeal, Democrats and consumer advocates branded the effort as a gift to financial institutions like Wells Fargo and Equifax. Both companies, in the face of corporate scandals, used arbitration clauses to try to quash legal challenges from customers.

The rule, Democrats argued, was precisely what was needed to protect the rights of vulnerable borrowers. Regulators and judges, including some appointed by Republican presidents, have also backed the position.

Class actions, they argue, are not just about the size of the payouts, which are typically spread out among a large group of people. They are also about pushing companies to change their practices. Large banks, for example, had to pay more than $1 billion to settle class actions beginning in 2009 that accused them of tweaking checking account policies to increase the amount of overdraft fees that they could charge customers.

“Tonight’s vote is a giant setback for every consumer in this country,” Richard Cordray, the director of the consumer bureau, said in a statement. “As a result, companies like Wells Fargo and Equifax remain free to break the law without fear of legal blowback from their customers.”

Nice work, Bob Corker and all the rest of the Republicans.

In case you want to read Margaret Chase Smith’s speech in its entirety: it’s here.

I’ll share an excerpt.

The United States Senate has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body in the world.  But recently that deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination sheltered by the shield of congressional immunity.

It is ironical that we Senators can in debate in the Senate directly or indirectly, by any form of words, impute to any American who is not a Senator any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming an American — and without that non-Senator American having any legal redress against us — yet if we say the same thing in the Senate about our colleagues we can be stopped on the grounds of being out of order.

It is strange that we can verbally attack anyone else without restraint and with full protection and yet we hold ourselves above the same type of criticism here on the Senate Floor.  Surely the United States Senate is big enough to take self-criticism and self-appraisal.  Surely we should be able to take the same kind of character attacks that we “dish out” to outsiders.

I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some soul-searching — for us to weigh our consciences — on the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America — on the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges.

I think that it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.  I think that it is high time that we remembered that the Constitution, as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation.

Whether it be a criminal prosecution in court or a character prosecution in the Senate, there is little practical distinction when the life of a person has been ruined.

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism:

            The right to criticize;

            The right to hold unpopular beliefs;

            The right to protest;

            The right of independent thought.

The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs.  Who of us doesn’t?  Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own.  Otherwise thought control would have set in.

The American people are sick and tired of being afraid to speak their minds lest they be politically smeared as “Communists” or “Fascists” by their opponents.  Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America.  It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.

The American people are sick and tired of seeing innocent people smeared and guilty people whitewashed.  But there have been enough proved cases, such as the Amerasia case, the Hiss case, the Coplon case, the Gold case, to cause the nationwide distrust and strong suspicion that there may be something to the unproved, sensational accusations.

Trump’s going to be blistering up the Twitter now, after Jeff Flake’s goodbye speech.

Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who has tangled with President Trump for months, announced on Tuesday that he would not seek re-election in 2018, declaring on the Senate floor that he “will no longer be complicit or silent” in the face of the president’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior.

Mr. Flake made his announcement in an extraordinary 17-minute speech in which he challenged not only the president but also his party’s leadership. He deplored the “casual undermining of our democratic ideals” and “the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency” that he said had become prevalent in American politics in the era of Mr. Trump.

Trump’s being president is as if Twitter trolls were president. Twitter trolls have been making personal attacks and flagrant disregard for truth and decency the social media norm for years, and now Trump is spreading that to the whole country. (They’re connected, too. Bannon is a troll, and Bannon’s boy wonder was Milo, who is definitely a troll.)

The announcement appeared to signal a moment of decision for the Republican Party. Last week, Senator John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, spoke in Philadelphia, denouncing the “half-baked, spurious nationalism” that he saw overtaking American politics. Former President George W. Bush, in yet another speech, lamented: “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism.”

On Tuesday morning, Mr. Trump had renewed his attacks on another critic in the Republican Party, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, saying he “couldn’t get elected dog catcher in Tennessee.” Mr. Corker, appearing more weary than angry, said the president “is debasing our country.”

But Mr. Flake, choosing the Senate floor for his fierce denunciation of the president, appeared to issue a direct challenge to his colleagues and his party.

Which they will ignore in favor of setting up three committees to investigate Hillary Clinton.

“It is often said that children are watching,” he said. “Well, they are. And what are we going to do about that? When the next generation asks us, ‘Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you speak up?’ What are we going to say?”

“I was busy investigating Hillary Clinton, and besides, shut up.”

“We must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal,” Mr. Flake said. “They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”

We know. We’re living it.

Brilliant satire.

House Republican leaders on Capitol Hill said they were launching two new investigations into Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, keeping alive a pair of storylines that have fueled anger with the party base.

One is a project aimed at looking into the FBI’s decision not to prosecute Clinton for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Less than an hour later, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said he would look into Clinton’s role in a 2010 uranium deal that became a favorite attack line by then-candidate Donald Trump.

Hahahaha that’s hilarious – saying they’re still investigating her even though she doesn’t have any kind of government job any more and they have more pressing matters like I don’t know North Korea Puerto Rico ISIS health insurance climate change – stuff like that.

But wait, there’s more.

Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, of Virginia, and House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy, of South Carolina, announced a joint inquiry by their committees to investigate the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email investigation last year, including the FBI’s decision-making “in respect to charging or not charging Secretary Clinton.”

So so funny.

Oh wait. This isn’t The Onion. It’s NPR. They’re not joking.