President Trump’s first major budget proposal on Tuesday will include massive cuts to Medicaid and call for changes to anti-poverty programs that would give states new power to limit a range of benefits, people familiar with the planning said, despite growing unease in Congress about cutting the safety net.
Fewer protections for the poor, more money for the rich – that’s populism? What’s pop about it?
After The Washington Post reported some of the cuts Sunday evening, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Trump was pulling “the rug out from so many who need help.”
“This budget continues to reveal President Trump’s true colors: His populist campaign rhetoric was just a Trojan horse to execute long-held, hard-right policies that benefit the ultra wealthy at the expense of the middle class,” he said.
My point exactly. Why do people keep being so confused about this?
The proposed changes to Medicaid and SNAP will be just some of several anti-poverty programs that the White House will look to change. In March, the White House signaled that it wanted to eliminate money for a range of other programs that are funded each year by Congress. This included federal funding for Habitat for Humanity, subsidized school lunches and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates the federal response to homelessness across 19 federal agencies.
Yeah, take away lunches from those lazy shiftless children. Why aren’t they part of the labor force?!
Trump gave his Talk to The Mooslims today, telling them he’s fine with the oppression of women as long as they don’t set off the odd bomb in places we Americans like to hang out.
President Trump sought to rally leaders from around the Muslim world on Sunday in a renewed campaign against extremism, rejecting the idea that the fight is a battle between religions even as he promised not to chastise them about human rights violations in their own countries.
“Go ahead! Violate all the human rights you want to at home! Just don’t do bad things to us. Do it to her, not to me.” Such a noble sentiment.
While Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush in different ways and to different degrees had promoted human rights and democracy as tactics to undercut support for radicalism, Mr. Trump made clear he did not plan to publicly pressure Muslim nations to ease their repressive policies.
Did Obama and Bush promote human rights and democracy solely as tactics to undercut support for radicalism? Did they not do so also because human rights and democracy are inherent goods?
“We are not here to lecture,” he said. “We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship. Instead, we are here to offer partnership — based on shared interests and values — to pursue a better future for us all.”
But it’s not about “telling other people how to live, what to do, who to be.” It’s about protecting everyone’s rights to decide how to live, what to do, who to be. In Saudi Arabia and similar theocracies, women are not free to decide how to live, what to do, who to be. Saying that human rights should be universal is not more coercive or intrusive than saying that human rights should be exclusive to men or white men or men of the correct religion.
Of course, Trump is such a reckless fool that it may be just as well that he’s not trying to address human rights issues…but that’s just one more reason to want him gone.
The New Orleans City Council had declared the city’s four Confederate monuments a public nuisance.
On Friday police cars circled the last one standing, the imposing statue of General Robert E. Lee, a 16-foot-tall bronze figure mounted on a 60-foot pedestal in the center of Lee Circle near downtown. Live news trucks were parked on side streets, and cameramen watched from the windows of nearby hotel rooms. The air was muggy and tense.
It’s a funny thing, but contemporary Germany doesn’t much fancy having giant statues of Hitler in downtown Frankfurt and Berlin and Heidelberg. It doesn’t see the period from 1933 to 1945 as a heroic age. Some Germans do, to be sure, but they’re 1. a minority and 2. wrong.
Three monuments already had come down in what represented a sharp cultural changing of the guard: First it was the Liberty Place monument, an obelisk tucked on a back street near the French Quarter that commemorated a Reconstruction Era white supremacist attack on the city’s integrated police force; next, Confederate Jefferson Davis — a bronze statue of the only president of the Confederacy, mounted on a pedestal in the working-class Mid-City area of town; then, Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, mounted high on a horse in a roundabout at the entrance to City Park.
Isn’t it a funny coincidence that the US Attorney General’s middle name is Beauregard? Haha no, it’s not, because it’s not a coincidence, it’s deliberate. Jefferson Beauregard – parents making a statement there, which Jeff has lived up to all his life.
Statue supporters say they represent an important part of the state’s identity and culture — but in a city where 60 percent of the residents are African-American, many see the monuments as an offensive celebration of the Confederacy and the system of slavery it sought to preserve.
Good old NPR, too chickenshit to say the monuments are in fact a celebration of the Confederacy and the violent fight against Reconstruction. They have to pretend it’s just hearsay, just opinion.
A fleeing Saudi woman faces grave risks after being returned to Saudi Arabia against her will while in transit in the Philippines, Human Rights Watch said today. Saudi authorities should ensure that Dina Ali Lasloom, 24, is not subjected to violence from her family or prosecution by Saudi authorities for trying to flee, Human Rights Watch said.
“Trying to flee” – that is what we in other countries know as traveling or emigrating.
On April 10, 2017, Saudi activists posted videos that appeared to show Lasloom at Manila’s international airport pleading not to be returned because she feared her family would kill her. The Saudi embassy in the Philippines issued a statement on April 12 saying that Lasloom’s return was a “family matter.”
No adult’s forcible return against her will is a “family matter.” Families don’t get to own people.
Human Rights Watch interviewed four people linked to Lasloom’s case, including two who said that they spoke to her at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
A Canadian woman, Meagan Khan, transiting through Manila on April 10, told Human Rights Watch that Lasloom approached her at 11 a.m. to ask if she could borrow her cell phone. She said that Lasloom identified herself as a Saudi woman living in Kuwait who intended to flee to Australia to escape a forced marriage and that airport officials had confiscated her passport and boarding pass for a scheduled 11:15 a.m. flight to Sydney.
Khan said she then assisted Lasloom in filming several short videos explaining her case, which were later circulated on social media networks. One video shows Lasloom saying: “They took my passport and locked me up for 13 hours … if my family comes they will kill me. If I go back to Saudi Arabia I will be dead. Please help me.” Khan said several hours later, two men Lasloom identified as her uncles arrived at the airport. After sitting with her for eight hours, Khan then left for her connecting flight.
Philippine immigration officials denied holding Lasloom in immigration detention, according to local media outlets. An airline security official, who requested not to be identified, told Human Rights Watch that he met Lasloom at about 12:30 p.m. on April 11 in the lobby of a small temporary lodging facility in Terminal One. He said that Lasloom told him that she feared going back to Saudi Arabia with her uncles and that he saw bruises on her arms that she said were the result of a beating by her uncles.
The security official said that at 5:15 p.m., while he was in the hotel lobby, he saw two airline security officials and three apparently Middle Eastern men enter the hotel and go to her room, which he said was near the lobby. He said he heard her screaming and begging for help from her room, after which he saw them carry her out with duct tape on her mouth, feet, and hands. He said she was still struggling to break free when he saw them put her in a wheelchair and take her out of the hotel.
Next stop, Saudi Arabia – where Donald Trump is currently making new friends.
A Saudi source sent Human Rights Watch photos obtained via a contact who works at Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport that show flight information that includes details of Lasloom, along with her two uncles, as passengers on Saudia Airlines flight SV871, which departed Manila at 7:01 p.m. on April 11 and arrived in Riyadh at midnight local time.
Reuters reported that several passengers said they had seen a woman being carried onto the plane screaming. One woman told Reuters, “I heard a lady screaming from upstairs. Then I saw two or three men carrying her. They weren’t Filipino. They looked Arab.” Two people who went to Riyadh airport at midnight to seek information about Lasloom told Human Rights Watch that she did not emerge from the flight with the rest of the passengers. Reuters also reported that a Saudi activist who went to the airport to meet Lasloom appeared to have been detained after approaching security officials to inquire about the case.
The role Philippine authorities played in Lasloom’s return is unclear. As a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the Convention against Torture, the Philippines has an obligation not to return anyone to a territory where they face persecution because of their gender or a real risk of torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
Maybe Donald Trump could ask his hosts about her?
No of course not. He’s been very clear: he doesn’t care about human rights. He’s all right Jack.
Lasloom’s whereabouts are currently unknown.
The Saudi authorities should disclose whether Lasloom is with her family or held by the state, Human Rights Watch said. If held by the state, the authorities should disclose under what conditions she is being held, including whether she is at a shelter at her request and whether she has freedom of movement and ability to contact the outside world. State shelter facilities in Saudi Arabia are used both to detain women and to provide protection for those fleeing abuse, and may require a male relative to agree to their release. Lasloom is at serious risk of harm if returned to her family. She also faces possible criminal charges, in violation of her basic rights, for “parental disobedience,” which can result in punishments ranging from being returned to a guardian’s home to imprisonment, and for “harming the reputation of the kingdom” for her public cries for help.
Human Rights Watch has documented how under Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship system, adult women must obtain permission from a male guardian to travel abroad, marry, or be released from prison, and may be required to provide guardian consent to work or get health care. These restrictions last from birth until death, as women are, in the view of the Saudi state, permanent legal minors.
“Saudi women face systematic discrimination every day, and Lasloom’s case shows that fleeing abroad may not protect them from abuses,” Whitson said.
Just kidding. He’s a big hit because he’s a cynical self-serving pig.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump is scheduled to deliver a speech that White House aides described as a call to Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world to unite against extremism. One senior White House official said the president hoped to “reset” both the global fight against Islamist terrorism and his own reputation for intolerance of Muslims, which was fueled by his campaign call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” After taking office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order to temporarily block visitors from some predominantly Muslim countries, but courts have blocked it pending a legal review.
But he didn’t mean Saudi Muslims. He didn’t mean rich Muslims with lashings of oil to sell. He meant those other Muslims – the ones he doesn’t like. No it’s true that he didn’t say that, but everyone knows it’s what he meant.
Mr. Trump’s royal hosts, whose country was not among those covered by the travel ban, have chosen to ignore that history in the interests of working with an American president who seems to share their goals and will not lecture them about repression of women or minority Shiites in Saudi Arabia, or its brutal conduct of the war in Yemen.
Hell no. He doesn’t care about any of that. Why would he? He cares only about himself, and money, and grabbing women by the pussy.
“Traditional Arab allies welcome the U.S. back because they believe it is largely on their terms: a U.S. that is clearly anti-Iran and anti-political Islam, a U.S. that de-emphasizes political reform and human rights, a U.S. that is in business mode and a White House that seems more accessible than in the past eight years,” said Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Anti-political Islam unless it’s Wahhabi political Islam. The little fact that the Saudis fund Wahhabi mosques all over the world, very much including the US, is neither here nor there.
Mr. Trump is the only sitting president to make Saudi Arabia the first stop on his inaugural, nine-day trip overseas.
And that says a lot about him, doesn’t it. He makes a beeline for an authoritarian theocratic country that treats the bulk of its people like shit.
There’s a multi-directional cacophony of gleeful back-patting ringing out across my Twitter feed at the moment. The outpouring of joy stems from an article published in Skeptic Magazine. Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay managed to submit a hoax article to a gender studies journal, and are hailing this as a profound, thermonuclear indictment on the entirety of gender studies, social science and the “academic left”. They wrote that:
“We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal”
Their article was initially rejected by a journal, “NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies”. But they were referred to a smaller outlet, ‘Cogent Social Sciences’, that offers publication where you ‘pay what you like’ (apparently, they didn’t pay anything).
On the face of it, this might seem like a clever take-down of predatory publishing practices. Sadly, that’s not the case. It’s presented by Boghossian and Lindsay, people sharing the article online, and by people responding, as a comprehensive demolition of gender studies, post-modernism, “social justice warriors” (SJWs, in alt-right parlance) and social science:
Ah that “gentlemen” – such a red flag for an asshole. They also like to call each other “sir” – “well played, sir.” Hot stuff.
The authors of the Skeptic Magazine article wrote:
“We suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified”
Most people, whether they’re part of the skeptic community or not, can recognise that a single instance isn’t sufficient evidence to conclude that an entire field of research is crippled by religious man-hating fervour, and that anyone pushing that line is probably weirdly compromised.
Years and years of steady Twitter will do that to a person.
He lists several science hoaxes, by way of making the point that it isn’t just gender studies that can be hoaxed.
The hypothesis presented by the authors – that gender studies is a sinister, anti-male left-wing fraud soaked in religious fervour – isn’t supported by a simple illustration of dodgy practices in academic publishing.
Which raises a very important question: why are the titans of the skeptic / rationalist community being pointedly irrational, when it comes to the reason this hoax was published?
Because they all despise feminism.
The article in Skeptic Magazine highlights how regularly people will vastly lower their standards of skepticism and rationality if a piece of information is seen as confirmation of a pre-existing belief – in this instance, the belief that gender studies is fatally compromised by seething man-hate. The standard machinery of rationality would have triggered a moment of doubt – ‘perhaps we’ve not put in enough work to separate the signal from the noise’, or ‘perhaps we need to tease apart the factors more carefully’.
That slow, deliberative mechanism of self-assessment is non-existent in the authorship and sharing of this piece. It seems quite likely that this is due largely to a pre-existing hostility towards gender studies, ‘identity politics’ and the general focus of contemporary progressive America.
…the isomorphism between the conceptual penis and what’s referred to throughout discursive feminist literature as “toxic hypermasculinity,” is one defined upon a vector of male cultural machismo braggadocio, with the conceptual penis playing the roles of subject, object, and verb of action.
That’s a line from the intentionally nonsensical “The Conceptual Penis As A Social Construct,” submitted as a hoax to, and then published by, the “multidisciplinary open access” and, as it turns out, “pay-to-publish” journal Cogent Social Sciences. The essay is by Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and James Lindsay, who holds a PhD in math and writes about atheism.
The part about pay to publish is why it’s only an attempted hoax, not a real one. To be a real hoax the essay has to be accepted by an actual editor for a journal that rejects submissions as well as accepting them. Pay to publish=all are welcome, all shall have prizes.
The authors take themselves to be perpetrating a new version of what’s now known as the Sokal Hoax, in which physicist Alan Sokal successfully published, in the journal Social Text, a nonsense article parodying postmodern writing about science. Here, Boghossian and Lindsay are taking aim at a different target,what they take to be “the moral orthodoxy in gender studies”:
[W]e sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil.
Ah yes, that’s a very reasonable and well-stated suspicion.
[I]t turns out that the joke’s on the hoaxers themselves—both for failing to spot some very obvious red flags about this “journal,” and for their rather bizarre leaps of logic…
[The paper] was accepted after what seems to be very cursory peer review, and, from this, they’re claiming that the entire field of Gender Studies “is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil.”
It might be. But their hoax gives us absolutely no reason to believe this. First, let’s look at the “journal” that they were accepted at. Like all the digital, open-access journals run by Cogent (a house most people have never heard of before now) it charges authors fees to publish. No reputable journal in the humanities does this. Worse yet, it allows authors to “pay what they can”. This appears to signal that this journal publishes work from authors who can’t get institutional support to publish in it. (Or, if they could, don’t seek this as they would prefer it not be widely known that they’re paying to publish.) The journal boasts also that it is very “friendly” to authors (a clear sign of a suspect outlet) and notes that it doesn’t necessarily reject things that might not have any impact. (!) It also only uses single blind review. The whole thing just screams vanity journal.
Now, the hoaxers are aware of all of this. But they try to duck the “facile” objection that they submitted to a junk journal by noting that it’s part of the Taylor and Francis group, and that it’s “held out as a high-quality open-access journal by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)”. Yet even a quick perusal of the journal’s website makes it clear that it operates entirely independently of Taylor & Francis, and that its publishing model is utterly different to theirs…
Having managed to pay for a paper to be published in a deeply suspect journal the hoaxers then conclude that the entire field of Gender Studies is suspect. How they made this deductive leap is actually far more puzzling than how the paper got accepted…
You can read the rest of Professor Taylor’s critique of this “big cock-up” here.
Jerry Coyne wrote a gloating post about the “hoax” yesterday.
Now we have another hoax: a piece on the “conceptual penis” published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences, self described as “a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences: from law to sociology, politics to geography, and sport to communication studies. Connect your research with a global audience for maximum readership and impact.”
Here’s the article; click on the screenshot below to see it in the journal (though it will probably be removed very quickly!). The paper has, however, been archived, and you can find it here.
Several academics in the comments point out that it’s not a hoax because it was published in a vanity “journal” but Coyne brushes them all off.
Embassies in Washington trade tips and ambassadors send cables to presidents and ministers back home suggesting how to handle a mercurial, strong-willed leader with no real experience on the world stage, a preference for personal diplomacy and a taste for glitz.
Oh if only that were all. There’s also the profound stupidity, the lack of control, the vanity and narcissism, the dishonesty, the rudeness, the total ignorance of history, politics, economics, and everything else, the temper, the vulgarity…to name a few.
After four months of interactions between Mr. Trump and his counterparts, foreign officials and their Washington consultants say certain rules have emerged: Keep it short — no 30-minute monologue for a 30-second attention span. Do not assume he knows the history of the country or its major points of contention. Compliment him on his Electoral College victory. Contrast him favorably with President Barack Obama.
In other words treat him like a toddler not yet out of diapers. How shaming it is.
President Trump was received like visiting royalty here Saturday, as his debut on the world stage competed for attention at home with ongoing news of the scandal encircling his presidency.
In a series of official arrival ceremonies — at the airport and the Royal Court palace — Trump, his wife, Melania, and an entourage including virtually his entire senior White House staff and much of his Cabinet, were serenaded by military bands, treated to a flyover of Saudi jets, feted in opulent palaces and given the undivided attention of King Salman, the ruler of this ultra-conservative Muslim nation.
That’s all he wants, you know. Non-stop groveling and adulation – is that so much to ask? He’s got gold plating on his faucets. Enough said.
As this desert capital baked in triple-digit heat under a pall of dust, American and Saudi flags flew from lightpoles. The facade of the Ritz Carlton, the palace-like hotel where Trump is staying, was illuminated with massive photographs of the two leaders and the red, white, blue and green of the two nations’ flags.
So pretty.
The only U.S. president to make Saudi Arabia his first foreign visit, Trump was presented with the highest honor for a foreign dignitary, the collar of Abdulaziz al-Saud, named for the kingdom’s founder, which Salman hung on a thick gold chain around Trump’s neck.
The administration officials and West Wing aides who were left grounded stateside on Friday late afternoon couldn’t do much more than dodge questions and vent inflamed frustrations at their boss.
Were they thinking he’s better than this? That doesn’t seem very bright either.
“Trump himself hasn’t been implicated in any of these leaks except where he’s implicated himself, where he says something that makes his perhaps less-than-sterling intentions clear,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the controversy candidly. “He keeps saying there’s no collusion, and I think he’s right. So if he would just shut his trap, what would Dems have?”
“Okay, he fired Comey,” the official conceded. “With a semi-competent comms operation, that would blow over in 24 hours. And that’s the worst part: he has a competent comms staff. But they can’t do their jobs because he keeps running his mouth.”
Doesn’t he just. But is that really a surprise?
Trump’s repeated media missteps have frustrated even longtime supporters. “Every day he looks more and more like a complete moron,” said one senior administration official who also worked on Trump’s campaign. “I can’t see Trump resigning or even being impeached, but at this point I wish he’d grow a brain and be the man that he sold himself as on the campaign.”
He seemed to have a brain during the campaign? Not that I saw.
Asked whether an administration staff change-up would ameliorate this latest crisis, a Republican source formerly involved with a pro-Trump political group told The Daily Beast, “yes, if it comes with a frontal lobotomy for Trump.”
The law enforcement investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign has identified a current White House official as a significant person of interest, showing that the probe is reaching into the highest levels of government, according to people familiar with the matter.
The senior White House adviser under scrutiny by investigators is someone close to the president, according to these people, who would not further identify the official.
My guess is Kushner.
The investigation is moving into the more visible interviews and grand jury subpoenas now.
Although the case began quietly last July as an effort to determine whether any Trump associates coordinated with Russian operatives to meddle in the presidential election campaign, the investigative work now being done by the FBI also includes determining whether any financial crimes were committed by people close to the president. The people familiar with the matter said the probe has sharpened into something more fraught for the White House, the FBI and the Justice Department — particularly because of the public steps investigators know they now need to take, the people said.
This is how all presidencies go, right? No? This is unusual, and bad? Maybe next time we shouldn’t elect an obvious liar and crook.
The White House also has acknowledged that Kushner met with Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, in late November. Kushner also has acknowledged that he met with the head of a Russian development bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been under U.S. sanctions since July 2014. The president’s son-in-law initially omitted contacts with foreign leaders from a national security questionnaire, though his lawyer has said publicly he submitted the form prematurely and informed the FBI soon after that he would provide an update.
Not much – just Trump telling Lavrov and Kislyak that Comey is a “nut job” and a White House official being a suspect in the Russia investigation. Just another day in the world of Donnie Twoscoops. (Double meaning there, geddit?)
President Trump told Russian officials in the Oval Office this month that firing the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, had relieved “great pressure” on him, according to a document summarizing the meeting.
“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to the document, which was read to The New York Times by an American official. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Trump calls Comey a nut job. In Trump world, Trump is reasonable and Comey is a nut job.
Mr. Trump added, “I’m not under investigation.”
The conversation, during a May 10 meeting — the day after he fired Mr. Comey — reinforces the notion that Mr. Trump dismissed him primarily because of the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives. Mr. Trump said as much in one televised interview, but the White House has offered changing justifications for the firing.
Which helps its credibility a lot.
The White House document that contained Mr. Trump’s comments was based on notes taken from inside the Oval Office and has been circulated as the official account of the meeting.
So they’re proud of it then.
Spicey didn’t dispute the story.
In a statement, he said that Mr. Comey had put unnecessary pressure on the president’s ability to conduct diplomacy with Russia on matters such as Syria, Ukraine and the Islamic State.
“By grandstanding and politicizing the investigation into Russia’s actions, James Comey created unnecessary pressure on our ability to engage and negotiate with Russia,” Mr. Spicer said.
Wtf? What is this “grandstanding” crap? I hate what Comey did in October and I hate it that he says he’d do it again, but how is investigating Russian meddling in our election “grandstanding” as opposed to doing his job?
A third government official briefed on the meeting defended the president, saying Mr. Trump was using a negotiating tactic when he told Mr. Lavrov about the “pressure” he was under. The idea, the official suggested, was to create a sense of obligation with Russian officials and to coax concessions out of Mr. Lavrov — on Syria, Ukraine and other issues — by saying that Russian meddling in last year’s election had created enormous political problems for Mr. Trump.
Oh, please.
The president has been adamant that the meddling did not alter the outcome of the race, but it has become a political cudgel for his opponents.
He can be as adamant as he likes, it makes no difference. He can’t possibly know that the meddling did not alter the outcome of the race. Insisting on it doesn’t make it true.
With all the glass he broke in that one meeting, just imagine what he’s going to get up to on this trip he just started. We may be at war by Sunday.
European governments, preparing for a round of major summits with Donald Trump next week, are wary.
I spent much of the past week speaking with officials and cabinet ministers in Europe. All they wanted to talk about was Trump. Here, in summary, are the most frequent remarks I heard, in rough order of frequency:
1. Trump is unstable, and we’re not going to count on anything he says or commits to.
2. Trump doesn’t support NATO or European integration.
3. Trump is actively encouraging racist nationalists in our country.
4. Trump is allied with Putin to bring Europe down.
5. There’s no doubt Trump worked with Putin to win the U.S. presidential election.
6. If Trump’s polls drop too low, he’ll start a war in order to get Americans to rally around him. (Opinions varied on whether Trump’s war would be with North Korea, Iran, terrorists in Nigeria, or an escalation in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan.)
7. How did you Americans come to elect this ego-maniac? (Others called him an infant, moron, ignoramus, fool.)
8. He’s another Berlusconi (or Franco, Mussolini, Salazar, Hitler).
9. We remember fascism. We never thought it would happen in America.
10. The world depends on American leadership. We’re very worried.
My overall impression: Anti-Trump sentiment is even stronger in Europe than it is in the U.S. If Trump expects his European trip to give him a reprieve from his troubles at home, he’s mistaken.
CEU PROGRESS REPORT FROM MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
Mixed progress. Hungarian government intransigent.
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
This has been a week of disappointment and promise. The chief disappointment was this week’s meeting with the Hungarian inter-ministerial working group, the first official face-to-face encounter with the government side since the passage of lex CEU. We came to the meeting hoping that the government would begin talks, but the government side made it clear that they will not negotiate with CEU. They also were unwilling to answer the simplest questions about the law’s operation following the first deadline for compliance on October 11. While we are always willing to talk to the government, further meetings of this kind are pointless. After the meeting, CEU called on the government, once again, to stop holding our 1,440 students and 980 faculty and staff hostage for political purposes, and bring this situation to a conclusion (see our May 17 press release).
The element of promise came from Brussels. On the same day as our meeting with government officials, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for the repeal of lex CEU. We at CEU now await the government’s response, expected at the end of next week, to the European Commission’s finding that lex CEU violates European law. We are also awaiting the Hungarian Constitutional Court’s ruling on the constitutionality of the law.
Meanwhile, the vital work of the university goes on. Our public outreach lecture series, Rethinking Open Society, will feature talks this month by renowned historian Niall Ferguson (Monday, May 22) and distinguished author Robert Kaplan (May 31), among several others. On May 26, Hungarian universities and educational organizations will hold a Teach-In at CEU to bring academics and educational professionals into dialogue around rethinking the role of universities.
We look forward to seeing students, staff, and faculty at the annual CEU Picnic on Saturday May 20.
Finally, as many of you know, there will be a demonstration on Sunday May 21, 5:30-8:30pm in favor of Europe, academic freedom, and freedom of association. As always, the university does not endorse or associate itself with any public demonstration, but faculty, staff, and students are, of course, free to take part or not, as they wish.
We are grateful for your strength and encouragement, and given this week’s developments, we need your continued support more than ever. #istandwithCEU / #aCEUvalvagyok
Best regards,
Michael Ignatieff, President and Rector
Liviu Matei, Provost and Pro-Rector
President Trump called the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, weeks after he took office and asked him when federal authorities were going to put out word that Mr. Trump was not personally under investigation, according to two people briefed on the call.
Mr. Comey told the president that if he wanted to know details about the bureau’s investigations, he should not contact him directly but instead follow the proper procedures and have the White House counsel send any inquiries to the Justice Department, according to those people.
It’s Trump, so it’s not a surprise, but it is. How can he be dumb enough to think that if he were under investigation by the FBI it would work to keep pestering the head of the FBI to shut that whole thing down? How can he not have realized that the head of the FBI is the last person to pester to do anything about that?
But maybe other people can pester the FBI director on Trump’s behalf?
The day after the Flynn conversation, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Comey to help push back on reports in the news media that Mr. Trump’s associates had been in contact with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign.
Oh dear god. No. Why would they think Comey would help them with their PR at all, let alone in that situation?
Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Thursday that “the sworn testimony” of both Mr. Comey and Andrew G. McCabe, the F.B.I.’s acting director, “make clear that there was never any attempt to interfere in this investigation. As the president previously stated, he respects the ongoing investigations and will continue working to fulfill his promises to the American people.”
Well that’s an enormous lie.
The F.B.I.’s longest-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, had close relationships with several presidents. But in the modern F.B.I., directors have sought an arm’s length relationship with the presidents they serve and have followed Justice Department guidelines outlining how the White House should have limited contact with the F.B.I.
Those guidelines, which also cover the F.B.I., prohibit conversations with the White House about active criminal investigations unless they are “important for the performance of the president’s duties and appropriate from a law enforcement perspective.” When such conversations are necessary, only the attorney general or the deputy attorney general can initiate those discussions.
But reality tv stars don’t know anything about guidelines and wouldn’t care if they did. They’re amateurs, intent on 1. enriching themselves and 2. trashing the joint.
Mr. Comey has spoken privately of his concerns that the contacts from Mr. Trump and his aides were inappropriate, and how he felt compelled to resist them.
“He had to throw some brushback pitches to the administration,” Benjamin Wittes, a friend of Mr. Comey’s, said in interviews.
Mr. Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the editor in chief of the Lawfare blog and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, recalls a lunch he had with Mr. Comey in March at which Mr. Comey told him he had spent the first two months of Mr. Trump’s administration trying to preserve distance between the F.B.I. and the White House and educating it on the proper way to interact with the bureau.
Mr. Wittes said he never intended to publicly discuss his conversations with Mr. Comey. But after The New York Times reported earlier this month that shortly after his inauguration Mr. Trump asked Mr. Comey for a loyalty pledge, Mr. Wittes said he saw Mr. Trump’s behavior in a “more menacing light” and decided to speak out.
So let’s read the post Wittes wrote last night, after the Times story appeared, since the rest of the article is based on Schmidt’s interview with Wittes. The post is riveting.
A few words of elaboration are in order.
I called Schmidt Friday morning after reading his earlier story, which ran the previous evening, about Comey’s dinner with President Trump and the President’s demands at that dinner for a vow of loyalty. Schmidt had reported that Trump requested that Comey commit to personal loyalty to the President, and that Comey declined, telling the President that he would always have Comey’s “honesty.” When I read Schmidt’s account, I immediately understood certain things Comey had said to me over the previous few months in a different, and frankly more menacing, light. While I am not in the habit of discussing with reporters my confidential communications with friends, I decided that the things Comey had told me needed to be made public.
I think he’s right about that. They are of public interest, to put it mildly, plus there’s Trump’s bullshit about “leaks.”
I did this interview on the record because the President that morning was already issuing threatening tweets suggesting that Comey was leaking things, and I didn’t want any room for misunderstanding that any kind of leak had taken place with respect to the information I was providing. There was no leak from Comey, no leak from anyone else at the FBI, and no leak from anyone outside of the bureau either—just conversations between friends, the contents of which one friend is now disclosing.
…
Comey was preoccupied throughout this period with the need to protect the FBI from these inquiries on investigative matters from the White House. Two incidents involving such inquiries have become public: the Flynn discussion and Reince Priebus’s query to Andrew McCabe about whether the then-Deputy FBI Director could publicly dispute the New York Times’ reporting regarding communications between Trump associates and Russian officials. Whether there were other such incidents I do not know, but I suspect there were. What I do know is that Comey spent a great deal of energy doing what he alternately described as “training” the White House that officials had to go through the Justice Department and “reestablishing” normal hands-off White House-Bureau relations.
Teaching the clueless tv star and his hacks how to do their jobs, in short. Imagine how trying that would be to someone who has other things to do.
Comey understood Trump’s people as having neither knowledge of nor respect for the independence of the law enforcement function. And he saw it as an ongoing task on his part to protect the rest of the Bureau from improper contacts and interferences from a group of people he did not regard as honorable. This was a general preoccupation of Comey’s in the months he and Trump overlapped—and the difference between this relationship and his regard for Obama (which was deep) was profound and palpable.
See all three are people who give a damn about the law, while Trump and Co are the opposite of that.
That’s one of the things I hate most about Trump and people like him – this refusal to respect knowledge and expertise no matter how significant and valuable it may be. I hate this cynical, frivolous, contemptuous indifference in people who know nothing but how to Market.
Second, Comey described at least two incidents which he regarded as efforts on the part of the President personally to compromise him or implicate him with either shows of closeness or actual chumminess with the President.
Which despite its infamy I didn’t know about. I’ve seen the clip of the final few seconds many times lately, but I didn’t know it was the end of any infamous hug. The story is fascinating.
The hug took place at a White House meeting to which Trump had invited law enforcement leadership to thank them for their role in the inauguration. Comey described really not wanting to go to that meeting, for the same reason he later did not want to go to the private dinner with Trump: the FBI director should be always at arm’s length from the President, in his view. There was an additional sensitivity here too, because many Democrats blamed Comey for Trump’s election, so he didn’t want any shows of closeness between the two that might reinforce a perception that he had put a thumb on the scale in Trump’s favor. But he also felt that he could not refuse a presidential invitation, particularly not one that went to a broad array of law enforcement leadership. So he went. But as he told me the story, he tried hard to blend into the background and avoid any one-on-one interaction. He was wearing a blue blazer and noticed that the drapes were blue. So he stood in the back, right in front of the drapes, hoping Trump wouldn’t notice him camouflaged against the wall. If you look at the video, Comey is standing about as far from Trump as it is physically possible to be in that room.
And for a long time, he reported, Trump didn’t seem to notice him. The meeting was nearly over, he said, and he really thought he was going to get away without an individual interaction. But when you’re six foot, eight inches tall, it’s hard to blend in forever, and Trump ultimately singled him out—and did so with the most damning faint praise possible: “Oh, and there’s Jim. He’s become more famous than me!”
Comey took the long walk across the room determined, he told me, that there was not going to be a hug. Bad enough that he was there; bad enough that there would be a handshake; he emphatically did not want any show of warmth.
Again, look at the video, and you’ll see Comey preemptively reaching out to shake hands. Trump grabs his hand and attempts an embrace. The embrace, however, is entirely one sided.
Comey was disgusted. He regarded the episode as a physical attempt to show closeness and warmth in a fashion calculated to compromise him before Democrats who already mistrusted him.
The loyalty dinner was five days after that.
Comey never told me the details of the dinner meeting; I don’t think I even knew that there had been a meeting over dinner until I learned it from the Times story. But he did tell me in general terms that early on, Trump had “asked for loyalty” and that Comey had promised him only honesty. He also told me that Trump was perceptibly uncomfortable with this answer. And he said that ever since, the President had been trying to be chummy in a fashion that Comey felt was designed to absorb him into Trump’s world—to make him part of the team. Comey was deeply uncomfortable with these episodes. He told me that Trump sometimes talked to him [in] a fashion designed to implicate him in Trump’s way of thinking. While I was not sure quite what this meant, it clearly disquieted Comey. He felt that these conversations were efforts to probe how resistant he would be to becoming a loyalist. In light of the dramatic dinner meeting and the Flynn request, it’s easy to see why they would be upsetting and feel like attempts at pressure.
I have a guess at what he meant by “in a fashion designed to implicate him in Trump’s way of thinking.” It’s what Trump does to all of us, in a way, but no doubt more so: he talks as if we all share his assumptions, no matter how crass and disgusting they are. My guess is that he says revolting things that Comey won’t feel he can dispute or rebuke, and that’s designed to implicate him in Trump’s way of thinking. We all feel slightly dirtier after watching Trump talk, I think?
There’s another story about Trump’s calling Comey up just to chat – as if they were chat-bros.
What bothered Comey was twofold—the fact that the conversation happened at all (why was Trump calling him to exchange pleasantries?) and the fact that there was an undercurrent of Trump’s trying to get him to kiss the ring.
Or maybe just to buy an overpriced condo in Boca del Vista.
He said one other thing that day that, in retrospect, stands out in my memory: he expressed wariness about the then-still-unconfirmed deputy attorney general nominee, Rod Rosenstein. This surprised me because I had always thought well of Rosenstein and had mentioned his impending confirmation as a good thing. But Comey did not seem enthusiastic. The DOJ does need Senate-confirmed leadership, he agreed, noting that Dana Boente had done a fine job as acting deputy but that having confirmed people to make important decisions was critical. And he agreed with me that Rosenstein had a good reputation as a solid career guy.
That said, his reservations were palpable. “Rod is a survivor,” he said. And you don’t get to survive that long across administrations without making compromises. “So I have concerns.”
In retrospect, I think I know what Comey must have been thinking at that moment. He had been asked to pledge loyalty by Trump. When he had declined, and even before, he had seen repeated efforts to—from his point of view—undermine his independence and probe the FBI’s defenses against political interference. He had been asked to drop an investigation. He had spent the last few months working to defend the normative lines that protect the FBI from the White House. And he had felt the need personally to make clear to the President that there were questions he couldn’t ask about investigative matters. So he was asking himself, I suspect: What loyalty oath had Rosenstein been asked to swear, and what happened at whatever dinner that request took place?
And under all this…there’s the fact that Comey himself may be the reason Trump is president.
Ah well as long as it’s only cishetero white people she’s calling cockroaches that’s fine.
No it isn’t. The Hutus saw the Tutsis as oppressors too; the Nazis saw the Jews as all-powerful and oppressive; othering dehumanizing language is not always aimed downward.
So where insectification is racialized language, how am I applying structural power in service of the harm of *cishetero white people*?
That’s a peculiarly dense question. Historically, “cockroach” has been a racist epithet, but the word isn’t inherently limited as such. It’s a fungible epithet; it works to dehumanize anyone.
______________________________________
Zoé Samudzi says it’s fine to call people cockroaches.
I said what I said. If my reasonable expression of anger is your major takeaway from this piece, so be it. I've nothing else to clarify. https://t.co/ghCtiT1QLd
It’s not “fake” and it’s not “offended.” She sounds like Rush Limbaugh. It’s a principled criticism of using othering language like that, with a note of the way it has been used by e.g. the Nazis, Hutus inciting genocide against Tutsis, Katie Hopkins inciting loathing of migrants.
You're not about to pretend I'm using that language of insectification as though I've structural power to drive discourse, keep it moving. https://t.co/esG0tfjLeC
Her “argument” is of no interest. What interests me about her is her way of bullying people on social media. The fact that she calls them “cockroaches” is the subject, while her “argument” is not.
@rachelvmckinnon Someone I blocked said "how can you use this given it's historically gendered meaning?"
“I believe it hurts our country terribly, because it shows we’re a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country,” Mr Trump told CNN and CNBC .
Huh. That’s funny, because his campaign was all about how divided and not-unified we are, and also all about making us more so. His whole shtick is Us versus Them. Drain the swamp; the people versus the experts; good people versus bad hombres; real Murkans versus scary immigrants; real voters versus fake voters; Trump versus women he dislikes. His inaugural address was about what a toilet the country is. His tweets are all about the press as enemies of the people and demons persecuting Donald Trump.
The decision came 10 days before Donald Trump had been sworn in as president, in a conversation with President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, who had explained the Pentagon’s plan to retake the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa with Syrian Kurdish forces whom the Pentagon considered the U.S.’s most effective military partners. Obama’s national security team had decided to ask for Trump’s sign-off, since the plan would all but certainly be executed after Trump had become president.
Flynn didn’t hesitate. According to timelines distributed by members of Congress in the weeks since, Flynn told Rice to hold off, a move that would delay the military operation for months.
Did he tell her he was a paid agent of the Turkish government? No he did not. He told no one.
If Flynn explained his answer, that’s not recorded, and it’s not known whether he consulted anyone else on the transition team before rendering his verdict. But his position was consistent with the wishes of Turkey, which had long opposed the United States partnering with the Kurdish forces – and which was his undeclared client.
But hey – he’s a good guy.
Now members of Congress, musing about the tangle of legal difficulties Flynn faces, cite that exchange with Rice as perhaps the most serious: acting on behalf of a foreign nation – from which he had received considerable cash – when making a military decision. Some members of Congress, in private conversations, have even used the word “treason” to describe Flynn’s intervention, though experts doubt that his actions qualify.
And yesterday Erdogan’s bodyguards were beating up protesters in DC.
WASHINGTON — Supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, including his government security forces and several armed individuals, violently charged a group of protesters outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence here on Tuesday night in what the police characterized as “a brutal attack.”
Eleven people were injured, including a police officer, and nine were taken to a hospital, the Metropolitan Police chief, Peter Newsham, said at a news conference on Wednesday. Two Secret Service agents were also assaulted in the melee, according to a federal law enforcement official.
The State Department rebuked Turkey.
Photos and videos posted on social media by witnesses showed a chaotic scene of flying fists, feet and police batons — all in the middle of rush hour traffic along stately Embassy Row. The video showed two men bleeding from the head and men in dark suits punching and kicking protesters, some lying on the ground.
Erdogan is the guy Trump congratulated recently when he won a referendum granting him new authoritarian powers.
The confrontation came after President Trump welcomed Mr. Erdogan to the White House on Tuesday and praised him as a stalwart ally in the battle against Islamic extremism. Mr. Trump did not speak of Mr. Erdogan’s authoritarian crackdown on his own people.
The White House has thus far been silent on the episode. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, referred reporters to the State Department and declined to comment further.
So we’ll conclude that Trump & Co like that sort of thing.
The episode was not the first time that Turkish security forces have ignited violence in the American capital. The police and members of Mr. Erdogan’s security team clashed with demonstrators last year outside the Brookings Institution, where Mr. Erdogan was giving a speech. Brookings wrote on its website that his bodyguards had “behaved unacceptably — they roughed up protesters outside the building and tried to drag away ‘undesired’ journalists, an approach typical of the Russians or Chinese.”
Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, who posted a video of Tuesday’s clash on his organization’s Facebook page, said that when Mr. Erdogan and his entourage arrived at the ambassador’s residence around 4 p.m., the president’s supporters gathered and rushed across the street and into the park where the protest was taking place.
Several of the protesters said they were caught off-guard when the group rushed through the police and into their ranks, which included some small children. All nine demonstrators who were hospitalized have since been released, but Mr. Hamparian said many left with stitches.
And the White House people couldn’t bring themselves to say that’s not cool.
Lucy Usoyan of Arlington, Va. was among them. Ethnically Yazidi and raised in Armenia before moving to the United States, she said she had expected a mostly quiet afternoon expressing her displeasure at Mr. Erdogan’s government.
Instead, she said, she ended up knocked to the ground and kicked until she was briefly unconscious.
“When I opened my eyes I saw people all around,” said Ms. Usoyan, 34. “Some were bleeding, and I could not get up.”
Sayid Reza Yasa, one of the organizers of the demonstration, said he lost at least one tooth and his nose was bloodied as he was knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly before the police intervened.
Mr. Yasa, 60, an American citizen who was born in Turkey and is of Kurdish descent, said he was familiar with the brutality of Mr. Erdogan’s forces, but surprised by their audacity on Tuesday.
“This is not acceptable,” Mr. Yasa said. “This is America. This is not Turkey.”
Both Dolezal and Tuvel demonstrate the infallibility and virtuosity of cis white womanhood: despite the harm they enact, they are still always worthy of understanding, protection, kid-gloves…It is not enough to simply hope that Dolezal, or any other career appropriator, simply disappears. As long as there is a structural and systemic investment in discrediting gender non-conforming and Black identities and subordinating the understandings they possess, these gaslighting genealogies that define and regulate humanity will continue, and the Dolezals of the world (and their defenders, and their defenders’ defenders) will spawn and flourish like the cockroaches they are.
In 1992, Leon Mugesera, a senior politician in Rwanda’s then-ruling Hutu party, told a crowd of supporters at a rally in the town of Kabaya that members of the country’s minority Tutsi population were “cockroaches” who should go back to Ethiopia, the birthplace of the East African ethnic group.
Der Sturmer ran contests encouraging German children to write in. One little girl wrote, “People are so bothered by the way we’re treating the Jews. They can’t understand it, because [Jews] are God’s creatures. But cockroaches are also God’s creatures, and we destroy them.”
